"We need more harlequins, fewer ticktockmen."

Said Icepick in last night's thread about Boston banning drinking games in bars. He began:

I recently read "The Scouring of the Shire" chapter from Return of the King. It was disturbing how much the Shire under (ultimately) Saruman's direction sounded like modern America. The country is being run by over-officious jerks, and the American people are putting up with it. Land of the free no more....

And then:

We need more harlequins, fewer ticktockmen.

A link goes to the Harlan Ellison story "Repent Harlequin!' Said The Ticktockman." 

Icepick advises:

Professor, I believe you need some more tags. One for over-officiousness, and perhaps tags for harlequins (see Swartz, for example) and for ticktockmen (anything with Bloomberg).

Ellison begins his story with a quote from Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience":

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purposes as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

Ellison introduces that quote with: "There are always those who ask, what is it all about? For those who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who need to know 'where it's at,' this...."

That story was published in 1965, when the phrase "where it's at" was quite the thing. 

ADDED: I just bought "Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the 20th Century," which contains "Repent Harlequin!"

The 200 greatest novels, stories, and poems...

... for $2.99. (The Complete Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, "carefully selected by the world's leading experts on literature and philosophy at Harvard University.")

The complete works of Tolstoy for $1.99.

The complete works of Dickens for $2.99.

And here are the complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson & Henry David Thoreau — together at last — for $1.99. 

What a world we live in! You can carry it all with you in a 6-ounce device. (Or something fancier.)

***

Somebody asked recently if I can see what it is you buy when you enter Amazon through my links, and the answer is yes. For example, somebody bought a compressor. Thanks!

ADDED: It's not the complete works of Leo Tolstoy, but — as revealed at the link once you get past the mistranscribed titled — 25+ works by Leo Tolstoy. It's missing some things I like, including "What Is Art?" I'm guessing the omissions have to do with the lack of translations. I'm always wary of these low-priced editions of literature to be read in translation. Personally, I bought all the items linked in this post except the Tolstoy. But note: there are some works in translation in the Harvard Classics collection (e.g., "Old Goriot").

"When we travel, though, we are asking for hospitality. There’s great vulnerability in this."

"It also requires considerable strength."

To be a good guest — like being a good host — one needs to be secure in one’s own premises: where you stand, who you are... Travel is a search for meaning, not only in our own lives, but also in the lives of others. The humility required for genuine travel is exactly what is missing from its opposite extreme, tourism.

Vulnerability? Humility? And — at the same time — it's supposed to be loftier than mere tourism?

The kind of travel to which we aspire should tolerate uncertainty and discomfort. It isn’t about pain or excessive strain — travel doesn’t need to be an extreme sport — but we need to permit ourselves to be clumsy, inexpert and even a bit lonely.

I used to throw myself out of my own country like that. Buy tickets to somewhere and then have to go. I wished I could back out. I was lonely when I was there. I spent a lot of money. I'm actually not a good tourist at all. It was always some kind of spiritual journey for me, a pilgrimage. So I don't identify with the tourism the linked authors sniff at. But I have become very skeptical of the notion that we are supposed to travel for lofty purposes. Is it humble to believe you're above those other tourists and somehow able to commune with foreign locals?

Somebody in the comments at the link quotes Thoreau: "I have travelled a good deal in Concord." That's what crossed my my mind too. Some years ago, I traveled, alone, to Amsterdam, and the book I read there was "Walden." I felt so lonely, and wrote down the quote: "Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?"

I got to that first link via Nina, who has traveled a good deal in Europe. She's comparing showers in France, Spain, and Wisconsin. In Spain and France, the public beach showers are out in the open. At Devil's Lake State Park in Wisconsin, they are in the bathroom, and when ladies are in them with the curtain closed, they expect you not to peek, even if they are taking too long.

I thought about this for a minute. Privacy. Our big entitlement. Mine, mine, not anyone else’s. It struck me that if someone screamed at me in this way in, say, France, I’d have to think that there’s pent up anger seething there, among the people....

So I wondered if maybe we are a nation of very angry people. As the media broadcasts our general dissatisfaction (with Congress, with each other), as opportunities for expressing anger flourish (blast away at the person you don’t agree with – it’s your right!), maybe we let it all out at the expense of looking for something less... well, loud?

Wisconsinites do have this sense of entitlement, and they shout in your face about it when they feel righteously angry. Remember the Rotunda. And they do mix up the concept of having rights with the problem of deciding when and how to use them. But privacy is a big one. And women can feel quite vulnerable, especially when taken a shower. There's a reason "Psycho" is judged the scariest movie of all time.

And, by the way... that article? The one promoting "vulnerability" in traveling? It was written by men. Of course. You want to stretch yourself beyond the usual realm of everyday life and what you come up with is vulnerability? Chances are you are not a woman.

"I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear..."

"... nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary."

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

That's the rest of the paragraph in Thoreau's "Walden" that begins "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

I'd looked it up when I was writing this morning's post "'Baseball as a Road to God' — the name of a course at NYU" and saying that "my father never went for a walk in the woods." I was big on "Walden" back in those days. Well, you know that. You know the story of me and religion and my high school graduation. It was back in that "Meade's Mud" post.

Remember: "Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place...."

And everything seems connected, now, doesn't it? There's Paris, and we were just talking about France and the French, and whether they're the ones who are not living what is not life.

To put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...

Rout. Cut. Shave. Drive. Reduce.

Meade's mud.

Meade declares that he has arrived at a great new method of making coffee. This isn't how he made it for me, but something he did for himself this morning.



"That's what they call 'mud,'" I say, getting my camera out. As I'm blogging the photographs, he wants to put the instructions his way: "Step 1: Buy the best coffee beans you can afford. Step 2: Grind as fine as possible. Step 3: Put ground coffee in a mug, pour hot water over it, stir. Step 4: Allow 1 minute for grounds to settle — for mud to settle — to the bottom. Step 5: Profit! Enjoy! Salut!"



I'm all excited because mud is a theme here on the blog lately. Writing yesterday about The House of Fallen Timbers, I was thinking  about Henry David Thoreau, who built his cabin in the woods. I dug out an old quote about that, and got quite absorbed in a passing reference to Thoreau's concern with "how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits." What are these "proper pursuits" that are not getting your living, and how much do you try to make time — to make freedom — for the things that are not living-getting? Do you even think in those terms? Perhaps you see getting your living as your proper pursuit, and it involves no loss of freedom. But then why do you see it that way? If you did not see it that way, what would you see? What would be your proper pursuit if it was not doing your job for the purpose of making a living? Perhaps there is another way to make coffee.

But Meade's mud took me back to the comments on the "Fallen Timbers" post. In the comments over there, Milwaukee said:

Henry David Thoreau is much more impressive if one doesn't learn that his mum wondered [sic] out once a week to collect, and drop off, laundry. But he did give us some things to think about, and I have a few favorite quotes, attributable to him, which I mangle. Specifically, the one about 'want to live, so as when I came to die, find that I had not lived.' and the different drummer thang.

Ah, it hurt me to see him diminished like that, because Thoreau had a big effect on me as a teenager, when I was thinking about how I wanted to live — what my proper pursuit was. There was one quote in particular, not any of the ones Milwaukee mangled. It was something with a distinctive word — mud — which made it easy to Google.  I found it and wrote this in the comments on the "Fallen Timbers" post:

I was assigned to give the "invocation" at my high school graduation, and I based it on a Thoreau quote. Afterwards, some people — including a nun — criticized me for not making a more conventional prayer.

Now, I teach Religion and the Constitution in law school, including the case where the Supreme Court nixed all graduation prayers.

My rights were soooo violated, and I was only trying to share a Thoreau quote that impressed me.

And now I share Thoreau quotes with all the world.

This was the quote:

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business."

Are you going about your business?

Mud.

"Life is made up of marble and mud." — Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud... And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. " — Shakespeare

"I made all my generals out of mud." — Napoleon Bonaparte

"We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars." — Ivan Turgenev

"I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French." — Charles de Gaulle

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance..." — Thoreau

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?" — Virginia Woolf

"They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies." — Orson Welles

"POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive." — Ambrose Bierce (from "The Devil's Dictionary")

"'As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.' Having said these things, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva.' Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud and said to him, 'Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing." — John 9:5-7

"The broad-backed hippopotamus/Rests on his belly in the mud..." — T.S. Eliot

Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.

The ’potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo’s voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus’s day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way—
The Church can sleep and feed at once.

I saw the ’potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

The House of Fallen Timbers...

... a small log cabin that David Lottes built from the dead trees that were cluttering up his 4-acree wood.

The blog-saga begins here.

ADDED: 2 good quotes in that blog's sidebar:

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” — John Steinbeck

"The secret of being a bore is to tell everything." - Voltaire

The Steinbeck quote reminds me of this essay by Larry Kaufmann: "The Occupy movement has it all wrong: Income mobility proves that the American dream is still alive." ("No one can change the past, so it's pointless to worry about what others have earned (or saved and turned into wealth) in previous years.")

The Voltaire quote seems like the theory behind Nina Camic's blog. She's in Paris now, after her pilgrimage to Warsaw. ("I’ve stopped speaking Polish for good... I became an immigrant without at least initially intending to be that....")

AND: Thinking of tiny houses and OWS encampments and prompted by Sofa King in the comments — Does he have all the permits for building that? — I went looking for this:

However, if one designs to construct a dwelling-house, it behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary.

I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and I thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am become somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. I am far from jesting... 

Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber.... It was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up....

I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much stronger than sawed ones....

I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap-doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house... $ 28.12 1/2.

Look at this GOP website.

It's interactive!

Via CNN:

The Republican National Convention launched a website blasting what it considers Obama's "leisure activities or missteps" during the oil disaster, like playing golf, attending concerts and vacationing in Asheville, North Carolina; Chicago, Illinois; and now Maine."

Obama has also faced criticism for scheduling a trip up north, instead of vacationing in the Gulf, as he advised other Americans to do.

Aw, come on, what is the problem? Republicans will complain about anything. Why aren't they happy to see him doing things other than governing. That government is best which governs least....

How will Yale close its $150 million budget gap?

"Yale University announced on Wednesday that it planned a number of steps to close a remaining $150 million budget gap, including cutting staff, freezing salaries for deans and officers, reducing the number of graduate students — even turning down all thermostats to 68 degrees."

Even turning down all thermostats to 68 degrees? Even?!

Sorry about your budget gap, but why the hell did you have winter thermostat settings above 68°? Even — even — if you have money to burn, you should want to keep temperatures at least that low for health and comfort. And I do not believe that the people who run Yale think that there's such a thing as anthropogenic global warming worth worrying a damn about. In fact, if you actually thought cutting carbon emissions was important, your thermostats would already be at 62° or lower. If you thought AGW is an emergency — of the sort Al Gore warns us about —you'd set the thermostat at 52° or lower.

Good lord, you're firing people from their jobs! Why are you still roasting the place to 68°?!

***

A literary reading:

Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, "to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting." So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? 

America's "literary flowering" was "a rebellion against what was thought of as academic, effete and indoors-y in English writing."

So how can a real, American literary artist take a job as a creative writing professor? Asks David Gessner.

[I]t’s hard to imagine [Thoreau] taking a break from one of his marathon strolls to waste three hours teaching a graduate workshop. Equally difficult is picturing Melville asking a group of undergrads, “What’s at stake in this story?” or Dickinson clapping a colleague on the back after a faculty meeting.

Yes, but did Henry and Herman and Emily have health care insurance and a retirement plan?

Gessner struggles with his cushy life and its obligations:

[C]reation of literature requires a degree of monomania, and that it is, at least in part, an irrational enterprise. It’s hard to throw your whole self into something when that self has another job.

But surely there are some jobs that provide substance and raw material for the writer. (Whaling, for example.) The problem with writers having jobs other than writing occurs when those jobs consume their time and attention, turn them into boring, conventional people, and give back nothing worth writing about.

But Gessner worries that the ideal of just writing is too irrational:

[Y]ou are sitting by yourself trying to make something out of nothing, and you rarely know where you’re going next. Creating your own world is an invitation to solipsism, if not narcissism, and as well as being alone when we work, we are left, for the most part, to judge by ourselves if we have succeeded or failed in our tasks. (Three guesses in which direction we most often lean.) My father succinctly summarized his feelings about my choice to dedicate my 20s to writing fiction. “You’re not living in the real world,” he said. I reacted with a young man’s defensiveness, but in retrospect his assessment seems less critical than a matter of fact.

Which is where teaching comes in. It provides all the practical things that can help prop us up above the morass of our insane callings, not to mention something we can wave at the world like a badge. And don’t forget this bonus: other people. How delightful to work on this thing called a hallway, populated not just by colleagues but by students, all committed to, or at the very least interested in, writing. And this is all without even mentioning the teaching itself. I love teaching.

Ah, yes, academia is lovely. I love teaching. All teachers must say that. But there are other, richer jobs for the writer. And I'm not convinced that a literary writer does well to spend so much time reading and correcting the writing of other people who are not very good. If you're going to teach and write, wouldn't it be better to teach some substantial subject that will have you thinking about something about that real world your father wanted you to live in? History, science, law....

Gessner ends his reverie thusly:

[A] part of me worries that my work has become too professional, too small, and worries that I don’t spend as much time as I should reading or brooding or even fretting. Yes, my lifestyle is more healthful, but is health always the most important thing? The part that answers no to that question is now lying in wait, looking for ways to undermine my so-far-successful teaching career. In fact you could argue that that part of me had a hand in writing this essay, which I am finishing now, a few weeks before going up for tenure. After all, what would that part, my inner monomaniac, like more than to tear off his collar and sabotage the job that keeps him from running wild?

Oh, is that what this essay is all about? Conquering the fear of being denied tenure? What do you think, would tenure denial be a blessing for Mr. Gessner? Do you want him back in his room, brooding and fretting year 'round?

Solitude and the lake.

I took my walk to work yesterday down by the lake -- Lake Mendota. That makes the walk a few blocks longer, but the lake has its mystic pull for the solitary individual, as I was and often am on my walks around Madison.

My camera took note of the other solitary figures.

The woman with a computer:



The man with a skateboard. He's feeding the ducks, which you are not supposed to do:



The man with headphones...



... and the man with a book and his foot up on the railing, the man tying his shoe, the seagull on the lamppost....

Are they -- are we -- lonely?

I think about 2 of my favorite Thoreau quotes, which I wrote down long ago on this page of my "Amsterdam Notebooks":

"A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will."

"Why should I be lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?"

Most people don't go too many places or get very far from home.

According to cellphone tracking data.

I've often thought about how embarrassingly cramped the track I take through the world is. I'd like to see a large, detailed map with the time I've spent in various places over the course of my life represented by dots of deepening colors. Even the track through my own house, depicted that way, would be absurdly limited. I'm often in bed, of course, but I'm also usually in one of 2 chairs. I always sit at the same side of the table. I drive around, but mostly in Madison. A map showing where I've driven would have a deep groove in a few streets and many streets unmarked.

Henry David Thoreau said: "I have traveled a great deal in Concord."

I don't even think I've traveled a great deal in Madison. I just lived in New York City for 9 months, and I found my groove there. There I was, walking down that street again, sitting at that table in that café and then on the middle cushion of the sofa, until it was time to go to bed again, and that meant to the left side of the bed.

Go on! Be adventurous. Lose consciousness on the other side of the bed tonight — why don't you? I don't want to. I'm happy right here where I always am.

And — the data show — so are you.

The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 26.

It's Day 26 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.) I'm in the museum, but passing the time by reading. If you're following the series, you already know, the book I'm reading is "Walden." Why should I feel lonely?





(Enlarge.)

The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 5.

It's Day 6 of this 35 day project. See the set thus far here. In this installment, I finally make my way into the Van Gogh Museum, which was the number 1 thing I wanted to do on the trip. I'm alone and reading "Walden" on this trip, and as I reach the museum, I reach the chapter "Solitude":

When did Prince start speaking in aphorisms?

The NYT quotes Prince:

"I always knew I had a relationship with God. But I wasn't sure God had a relationship with me."

This is in the format of any number of old quotes:

[Asked: do you believe in God?] The question is: Does God believe in me?

And:

[When asked if you've made your peace with God.] I did not know that we had ever quarreled.

The first quote appears in the movie (and the book?) "Lolita." The second was supposedly said by Henry David Thoreau (who also said "One world at a time" when asked if he'd thought about the afterlife).

Aphorisms rule. Here's a nice and incredibly cheap book of aphorisms I like. An ideal book in which to scribble marginalia.