colors

We pull out of my station for the morning's subway ride to the office.  The conductor: "This is an important messages from the MTA, New York City Transit.  Please do not hold the doors open by sticking your blue backpack in the rear of the train into the doors.  Thank you for riding, and have a good morning."

I exit onto the midtown sidewalks behind a prosperous mother with her little boy's hand in hers, walking beside her.  He's perhaps 4 and she is pointing out basic building features to him as they walk along: "That's a sliding door.  That's a column.  Those are stairs.  That's a drain."  He seems half interested, but then stops and points his fingers, "Oh, Mommy, look at that!"  She looks in the shop window and says, bringing him back to pace, "Oh, that's just a design."  They go on.  A second later I pass and look in to see a boldly patterned rug, crimson and canary yellow, hanging in display.  For those who care to see it: bright above the drain.

pasties

A good writer knows how to shove the eels into the pot and hold the lid down firmly until the water boils.  So says someone struggling to write.

now

Familiarity also breeds contemptibility.

as if Bea Arthur were your spokesperson

A distinct New York City voice is found in advertising and commercial tag lines that lay flat and heavy as the thick steel plates that cover street excavation.  Ess-A-Bagel: "EVERYTHING ON A BAGEL."  A local home furnishing chain called BETTER YOUR HOME.  Papaya King: OUR FRANKFURTERS ARE TASTIER THAN FILET MIGNON.  Fairway Market: LIKE NO OTHER MARKET.  The flat absence of lilt; the nearness to threat: the heavy charm of words meant to be read not heard in the mind.

wages

Some adult lives amount to the funding of bad habits.

folk Freud

When a suckling babe bites the nipple, the flow of milk stops.  And this is the ideal in punishment: there is correspondence and proportion. 

The correspondence is to what the babe wants: milk is wanted, and it is the supply of milk that is interrupted.  The correspondence is not to what the mother suffered.

The proportion is to motivation.  A young babe had little or no motive to bite and the interruption in suckling is for only a few seconds.  An older baby, perhaps, is motivated by temper, and the interruption is longer.

This ideal applies throughout human punishment: when possible, the punishment should correspond to the desire connected to the crime and should be proportioned to counter the bad motivation, with a margin sufficient to public safety (this is why fines and imprisonment should, in my view, be indexed to wealth as well as sized to harm).  Practically, this is often a sharp, sudden, sizable interruption to the flow of what is desired: power over others, money, pleasure, and so forth.

Now, the ideal may not be possible.  And when it isn't, aim for correspondence in time, that is, immediacy, and for limited cost, that is, avoiding excess trouble, resistance, and risk of resentful learning of the wrong lesson.  It is in this light that corporal punishment, never ideal, may be the least bad option.

crime on tv

We Americans came together this week to watch a lot of live porn.  And when it was over, we stood up and cheered.

folk anthropology

I think we have a faculty for alertness to threats to the group we perceive ourselves as belonging to.  The same thing that makes herds circle and flocks of birds fly in unison at the sight by one of a cat, while the squirrel they surround is unperturbed.  We know, but this faculty within us does not know that what is on the other side of a computer or television screen is not here unless there are visual cues that mark the situation as other.  That is why we respond to violence in foreign locales with prayers and sympathy, but with nothing like the riveted alertness an American news watcher presently feels, watching news in Boston.  And it is interesting and important and sad - so there is nothing to push back against the instinct to alertness that rivets the viewer.  Add that it is visual and violent and has villans (unlike a fertilizer plant explosion that was objectively much worse and at least as deserving of attention) and that this is going down in locations that anyone can feel they know (Cambridge, MIT, etc.), and finally that it is one of those landmark shared experiences (I remember where I was when...), and you have a very powerful package.  Of course, for someone who actually lived for years in Cambridge, I can't help the silly, self centered thoughts: that was my 7-Eleven!; that was my Target parking lot!; can you imagine shutting down the whole T?!

formation

What I am saying is: don't give children the vote, precisely because they will be voting citizens.

nursery

The groundsoil of a healthy democracy is not itself democratic: generally happy homes, a civic disposition to neutral sympathy and open public space, usually bought at the (heavy) price of fierce protection of the literal and figurative perimeter.  But democracy itself drops unhealthy leaves - tricks and traps, stunts and Huey Longs - onto that soil, that must either be swept away or outweighed.

JFK

Absence makes the heart see farther.

confounded contraption

Electronic devices deserve more of that word's Victorian connotations.

sayings

Some day I'm going to tell him how the cow ate the cabbage.

party time

Marriage is for others than the couple, first and foremost.  Even the couples' benefits of marriage are chiefly benefits from others, including via the state.

curmudgeonly

Nothing gets lost in translation.  I might as well say my furniture gets lost every time I leave my apartment.  What's awry is the overburdened idea of translation itself - which we somehow set up as Calvin and Hobbes style transmogrification or, worse, as nearly the same as translation in its theological meaning.

spiritual gloves

A certain steady, impermeable incomprehension is how human goodness usually best approaches certain evil.  No explanation, no reformation, no easy sympathetic self-identification, nor even investigation beyond establishing the fact of evil: only capture. 

glories

Fargo's ending, actually better than many of Shakespeare's denouments: Marge Gunderson looks back at the killer she's captured, through the rear view mirror of her sherriff's car.  "So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don't you know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it."  She turns the keys in her car's ignition, shakes her head softly, and drives towards town, joined eventually and silently by cars called in for reinforcement, their red squad lights turning against the white winter, in slow procession.

plectrum

Sightings:  On the carpeted floor of a Manhattan law firm ("high atop the Acme Buiding"), in fact, right outside my office door: a guitar pick.  Stranger still: inspection reveals that it was well used.  I accuse: Col. Mustard, in the Library, with the candlestick!

N Train

As sand through an hourglass do we exit a crowded subway car.

baubles

Childhood memories:

• The crabapple tree in the side yard, and crabapple drink.
• Magnolia cones dropped from the magnolia tree, and their red seeds, with little strands of sticky silk behind.
• Waiting for the red flag on the mailbox to go down so that I could run check the mail.
• The "room" back in the woods made out of briars and bramble.
• The little red building behind our house, and inside, the wave of white painted on the wall.
• Riding bikes to the gas station for hot dogs.
• Pine rosin on our hands from climbing the trees.
• The scales for weighing vegetables at our aunt's farm stand and poking our uncle's tractors under the shed.
• Watching Dad crank open our camper trailer at the state park campground, brushing our teeth in the little camper sink and sleeping on the childen's side of the camper, vinyl curtain drawn, listening to Mom and Dad on the other side, talking quietly to one another in the night.

Thatcher

For better and worse, there are those who make the world their theater, with a kingdom for a stage, princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene.  Where they find the strength to stride so, God only knows.  Some are monsters, none are angels, Thatcher was neither.  And those that are neither, despite our qualms, make the world - and indeed ordinary living - more of the beautiful adventure that living ought to be.

chilling

"In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all the time."

broken

The horse pulls the wagon because he cannot see a way out from habit.

neighbor's wife

Social norms of monogamy are partly - and importantly - a matter of civil peacekeeping.

like units

Money makes a poor story.  Money eludes our sense of time.  Money is a numeric abstraction and we are concrete innumerates by nature.  Money is important.

good clean fun

Ooh, the tourists sitting next to us walked out of "The Nance" because they were offended.  Didn't take them long either: just a quick escalation in body language communicating disgust and repulsion, then glances to one another and departure.  That made the show much more fun.  And, to be fair, we weren't expecting a minute long baring of freshly bathed, hairy ass either, nor the glint of stagelit testicles dripping with bathwater, nor some believably acted horny anonymous-sex fueled kissing.  It's ok to walk out if you don't like that.  We and the rest of the New Yorkers and Nathan Lane-loving tourists stuck around.  And - oh yes - the elderly lesbian couple sitting on the other side of us up in the balcony were doing some discreet petting by the time intermission snuck up on us.

No, "The Nance" wasn't great writing - just good writing with a few bits of new and solidly written pathos and, mostly, the good grace to get out of the way now and then and let us enjoy a good twenty minutes, combined, of beautifully resurrected genuine old burlesque chestnuts.  That you won't find anywhere else.

Robert Bringhurst

I had it all under control.  Less furtive calligraphy when alone at home.  No more guilty amazon.com purchaces of old books on letterforms, page composition and poster script.  But now it all gets out of hand: letterpress books of essays on the physical act of reading; old used copies in German of theories of stroke width in written and printed lettering; a survey of Soviet typefaces.

This is what happens when I don't have enough work to do.

flags and eagles and tanks

"James J. DiFidele, Esq., Attorney at Law", reads the small billboard in Queens.  The visual is basically unsuprising: a bald eagle, a waving American flag, the attorney himself, nicely coiffed, smiling and confident, photo cropped at mid-chest.  All perfectly normal.  But, but - he is wearing a tank top.