Paper Wednesday

As the week drags on, the newspapers in my neck of the woods get more interesting. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are the best. Sunday, having been the edition in the not too distant past, has become unreadable, to the point where even the comics pages have now been reduced to four, down from six, down from eight pages a decade ago. The book section is now a miserly four pages. The newspapers are dying, well deserved deaths, some say, of leftist dinosaurs. In the meantime, today:

From a review of a book by Benjamin Markovits A Quiet Adjustment, a fictionalized story of the marriage of Lord Byron:

The only-you-can-save-me bad boy act has been catnip to countless generations of young ladies, and certainly Annabella (Miss Annabella Milbanke) responded to this come-on, admiring Byron's talent and intelligence, not to mention his good looks and position in society. She was confident she could prune his flaws and water his genius after they were married. Byron, for his part, was intrigued by this self-possessed young woman who declined to throw herself at him. Her refusal of his first proposal only heightened the poet's fascination for her. He was to pursue her for two more years before she accepted.

And, in the other paper today, from an article about the lead singer and songwriter Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows (not one of my faves):

“My life is like being on acid, all the time,” he says. “It’s an associative disorder, so the world doesn’t look real. And I know that it is real — people tell me it is — but that doesn’t help much.”

The worst period was pre-diagnosis, from 2003 to 2006, when he hid in his apartment, forced himself to stop writing and shuddered when physicians proposed treatments such as electro-shock therapy.

“And the problem is, you begin to get scared all the time, and then you begin to drift away. Because the world’s not real, people aren’t real, so you don’t need to be connected to anyone or anything,” he says.

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

A few quotes and a link to an interview:

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.

You can only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power-he’s free again.

It is not the level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes are within our power . . . a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.

Waiting

Torrential rain, thunder, lightning suddenly descended on us as we drove back cross town in heavy evening traffic. Streams of water pouring down the windshield. A cloud must have broken, someone said. Left behind, she stood alone in a crowd of people, a crowd confused, uncertain if and when flights would take off. There was no one present to answer questions, to assure the stranded travelers. Chaos. Lasting an hour.

It hadn't started very encouraging, anyway. We had arrived early expecting to find the old terminal, where a flight took off once every half hour, deserted. Instead, the line snaked back and forth along the long room three and a half times before reaching a tall young man with a punk haircut guarding the gate and directing travelers to open windows, first three windows, then two, one, then four. By waiting she wouldn't make it to the gate in time, but was told at the information desk to join the queue anyway, and when her flight's check in would be closing, an announcement over the loudspeaker was to tell her to move to the head of the line. Why even wait in line? I asked the young punk rhetorically if the old regime was still running the joint. Two older men laughed. A few frustrating minutes later, the punk was called off somewhere, and I pushed her under the rope toward an open window. She was on her way.

I got off the streetcar at the stock exchange stop, near the museums and the monument of Charles de Gaulle. I walked past the stores Emporio Armani, Marc Cain, Escada, then ING Bank opposite a round Church in the center of the square where a priest was heard singing, as I walked by the fence of the Institute of the Deaf (established in 1817), finally passing The Olive Garden restaurant before turning east by the Sheraton Hotel towards the river. There was a milk bar at this square once, and a dive called the Rocking Horse where local homosexuals gathered, what has happened to them?

His directions were good. "Do you know where the Buffo Theater is?" "No!" , "The Army Museum?","No", "The Sheraton?" "Yes." "The park lies past the Sheraton and the old YMCA building behind it. The concert starts at 7, be there before 7 and we'll chat."

Nearing the park, I passed the elegant villa of the Embassy of Kuwait. The stage was situated outdoors under an open tent, and in front of it several smaller square tents with rows of rattan chairs underneath them. A tree or two blocked some views. On the small hill behind the stage, a young couple rode mountain bikes. In the sound booth three long haired guys dressed in black practiced on accoustic guitars. A group of a dozen older people took the center front row seats. It was early, just after six. He wasn't there. Nearby, in crowded open air caffes, groups of people were sitting at tables, instrument cases beside them. I paced around. Two pairs of tourists approached me, one of the men asking, "Pardon me, are you from this city?" "No, rather not," I answered awkwardly after a moment of hesitation.

At ten to seven, the musicians, dressed like California slobs, started coming one by one toward a closed tent on the side of the stage. Is this their stage getup, I thought? Times are surely changing. He showed up exactly at seven, shook hands with other organizers and the stage hands before coming to greet me. We embraced. "How is living" he asked, answering himself with another question,"Living?"

He can't stay, Michael is driving him to a birthday party. Oh, and Michael was looking forward to meeting her and talking American. Sorry, she had to leave early, Sorbonne's waiting. He and Michael have just returned from a country wedding, where moonshine was served. The country folk still make it! I could smell it on his breath, and he confessed he had to make sure to stay clear of his boss' nose. The moonshine recipe, he had learned, was based on an important historical date - 1410: 1 part yeast, 4 parts sugar, 10 parts water.

Somehow, the orchestra managed to start the concert without much delay, just a few minutes after 7. They were now wearing black suits, white shirts, 16 men and women, all strings, an orchestra without a conductor, originating, he told me, from my mother's home town over the present border.

We briefly got up and walked back to say 'hello' to Michael, and another older fellow, whom I might have known, he said, from the old days. My brother works for Sun in San Jose, the older fellow told me. Back to our seats and he soon said goodbye, wishing me a jolly good time. So far, they're hitting flat notes, I replied. So long until tomorrow to watch a gypsy ensemble. Be here at six!

He and Michael took off, and the orchestra quickly got up to speed after the first shaky piece, playing Astor Piazzola, Strauss, Offenbach, even slumming once into pop modernity with an original arrangement of Yesterday, which the audience, almost all seniors, might have been to old to dig. But who knows, people tend to age early here. I had planned to split soon, and stayed to the end. Jolly good time.

It started raining as I walked back to the streetcar stop on the Avenue. On top of a restored seven story art deco building, where the ground floor Poetry Bistro tempted my thirst, the crowned neon sign of Rolex came on.

Infernal dialogue

I found the following text on one of the Web forums. The author did not identify himself or herself.

One of the better exercises I’ve heard of to increase control over the internal dialogue is based on an interesting theory.

It is that the part of the brain in charge of talking to ourselves is the same part that involves attention. It has finite resources, so if you can fully use them on attention instead of talking, with practice it gives you more and more control over that part of your mind. Sometimes described as like having a “talk to yourself on/off switch”.

By not talking to yourself, you learn how not to talk to yourself.

Thus the exercise is to do several physically undemanding things at the same time, that use a lot of attention.

Ordinary walking uses a great deal of attention, directed to the legs to keep navigating, avoiding obstacles, etc. So it is a great starting point. Added to that, as you walk, holding your hands in some unusual manner, like with two of the fingers crossed. It doesn’t matter what, just as long as your attention is directed to your arms and hands as well as your legs and feet. If you lose attention on your hands, you just change how you are holding them.

The real trick is to unfocus your eyes. And this uses some interesting psychology. Normally, when you look at things, your attention and focus is “point to point”. You look from tiny spot to tiny spot, which uses just minimal attention, seeing most things peripherally. But when you unfocus your eyes, the whole 180 degree tableau in front of you is equal, as far as your attention is concerned.

And this uses a whopping great amount of attention.

Combining all three things: walking, holding your hands funny, and unfocusing your eyes, overwhelms that small part of your brain by taking so much attention, that it just doesn’t have the ability to keep up the internal dialogue.

And you stop talking to yourself, for longer and longer times.

Walking around this way is easy to learn, and with just a mile or two, every day or two, you start to notice increased concentration in about two weeks. And the effects tend to be cumulative, so the more you do it, the better you get.

Imagine being able to sit down and do an entire SAT test without distraction.

I knew one young man who did this exercise, almost because he had to. His internal dialogue was so intense that he continually vacillated back and forth between focused and unfocused. The end result was that he sounded like a California surf bum. He could barely speak a sentence without being distracted. It was both exhaustive and very frustrating for him.

In about a month, I saw him again, and he looked revitalized. He was almost a different person, could speak in whole paragraphs, and loved the ability to actually finish things he had started. I also noted that he was bursting with energy, no longer having to commit so much brain power to internal dialogue and bouncing back and forth.

There are all sorts of ways of accomplishing much the same thing, but he is the reason I remember this exercise so well.

Gretsch G5810

Rock and roll pioneer Bo Diddley, who influenced just about every first and second generation rock and roll musician, has passed away. "Watching Bo Diddley (in 1963) was university for me," said Keith Richards in a recent interview.

Gretsch G5810 is the model of electric guitar designed by Gretsch and Bo Diddley in 1958. It became Bo Diddley's signature instrument.

From a newspaper obituary:

He never lost a feeling of resentment that his signature rhythm couldn't be copyrighted and that record royalties went unpaid. "I am owed, and I never got paid," he told Associated Press in 1999. "A dude with a pencil is worse than a cat with a machine gun."

28 shades

I was walking my dog around the neighbourhood park one early evening, when a little girl at a soccer (futbol) practice there, she must have been eight or nine, noticed us and remarked, "Your dog has a beautiful colour". His fur has more than one colour, the colours and markings of a yellow Labrador Retriever, which he is not being a mutt, that is to say streaks of white, orange, shades of light brown, beige, certainly, not yellow, a couple of dark brown spots on his ears and a pink nose.

The next afternoon, I was walking with a friend from work to the train station, and we were talking. Or rather, I was walking as fast as I could, and he was riding his bicycle as slowly as he could. We were looking at the massive, seven story concrete parking structure that's just opened near the station. Some local politician had called it The Tower of Torture. It was recently painted beige, one of the eight beige colours that had been considered and argued over by committees and people's representatives. The chosen colour is called "Death Valley" and it beat out "Destiny" and, believe it or not "Pearl Harbor". (The Tower of Torture remains an eyesore on the landscape, whether it's beige, or concrete gray.)

My friend, who's red headed, while I'm silver headed, wasn't surprised when I told him I had learned there were eight shades of beige paint. "Oh, yes," he said, "and there are twenty shades of white, I discovered when we were painting our house." He then told me that I wouldn't believe how the brightest white paint was made. "They make it," he said, "by adding a little bit of black to it."

OK, that's something for someone who has studied color theory to figure out. We said goodbye, he headed for his green bus which starts its route at the station, his bicycle to hang on a rack in front, I for the silver train where bicycles, if any, ride inside the passenger cars. The train car I entered was almost empty, this is the end, suburban station, there were three lone women seated, all of them dressed in black (of course), and three bicyclists, sitting near the exit doors with their bikes, all three of them wearing those bright reflective, yellowish green nylon jackets that make them clearly visible on the road. I was, as usual, colour mismatched myself.

The train soon started out for the green hills that about now are starting to turn shades of yellow, beige, brown, the colours, coincidentally, of my dog's fur.

7 doors

To reach my office cubicle from the ground floor gym, I exit through the gym's back door in the weight room, turn right and walk a short corridor behind the daycare center, climb a flight of stairs, step past the round, windowed wall of the corporate data center, then across the second floor bridge between the buildings, past a double row of cubicles into a center hallway, turn right to approach another stairway, and climb one more flight, turn left to walk north then west, passing the printer area, all the way to the outermost corner of the third floor, right next to a small open lounge by the tall windows overlooking the vast company parking lot, a sparsely occupied modern office park beyond it, and a 3,849 foot mountain in the distance. The hike takes no more than a minute or two -- I'll have to clock it with a stopwatch sometime -- probably less time than if I walked across the courtyard to the back entrance of my building and took one of the three elevators up; and the only people I ever and infrequently encounter during this daily walk are an office mailroom worker pushing her cart, or a building maintenance man, or a computer engineer emerging from the data center, which is called a 'lights out center', that is to say, not staffed, and to complete this journey I have to open seven doors, which slam loudly behind me all by themselves, breaking the perfect silence of these colorless, odorless corridors and stairwells straight out of some 1960s Michelangelo Antonioni film.