The Casual Blog

September 25, 2010

My favorite gadget

My iPhone is a marvelous gadget, but as will happen with gadgets, the magic has faded somewhat. Part of it is simple familiarity: a year-old gadget is just not as exciting as a new one. Part of it is competition: I’m in that wonderful phase of new love with my iPod. Also, with the introduction of the slick new iPhone model, my 3G seems the tiniest bit frumpy. And part of it lately has been frustration with minor glitches from the new operating system, which I downloaded three weeks ago. In particular, the device started asking me for a password to my voicemail, and I didn’t have a password. I was locked out.

I’ve been super busy at work lately and simply haven’t had the combination of free time and fortitude needed to call AT&T, navigate the voicemail system, and get a sentient human to solve the problem. Meanwhile, there’s been a constant low-grade worry that someone might leave me a voicemail that could have consequences if left unattended. It’s probable that a business voicemail to my iPhone would have a related voicemail on my office phone, or a related email somewhere. But not certain. And there’s even less certainty that a personal voicemail would have a margin of safety. How many friendships have been lost due to ignored phone messages? There was definitely risk involved.

Last week at Red Hat we had the mother of all meetings, a week-long assembly of the legal department personnel from around the globe. In addition to organizational and speaking duties, I contributed many hours of attention to the presentations. I particularly enjoyed getting to know some of my really interesting colleagues from distant offices (Singapore, Beijing, Sao Paulo, Munich, Mountain View, Tysons Corner). And in the course of a gadget discussion with Tom Y, I got a lead on how to solve the voicemail problem — attwireless.com

So, finally, on Saturday morning, I woke up early, went to the gym, swam 1700 meters, did some yoga, got some gas for Clara, came home, walked Stuart, fed him and the cats, had some coffee and cereal, read the Times, and then went to attwireless.com. It took some looking about, but I finally found the proper tab for resetting the wireless password, and got it done. But along the way there was one last challenge.

I had to choose security questions and enter answers. The questions were mostly in the form of What’s your favorite whatever — favorite food, movie, song, etc. You’d think, or at least ATT&T must have thought, I’d know such things. But I could not come close to determining what I would probably say in the future was my favorite in any of the categories. There were too many possibilities, too many things in each category that I really liked and might on a given day think could be my favorites. And for things I really care about (including movies, food, and music), I hate the thought of being unfair and untrue and designating as a favorite something that is not the true, ultimate, most fantastic favorite. Admittedly this was a minor problem, but still, a problem. In the event I could not remember my password, missing the security questions as well could be a real headache.

Fortunately, in the end, there were questions involving personal history that I could substitute and be reasonably confident that, absent traumatic brain injury or dementia, I’d answer consistently. So, I’m back in business with voicemail. Somewhere ahead there’s a new gadget problem, but right now I’m good. iPhone, don’t tell anyone, but you’re my favorite.

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September 21, 2010

Welcome to fall and a new ballet season

Of the four seasons, fall is my favorite. Finally there’s a break in the hot weather, and the cooler temperatures make it easier to move. Days shorten, leaves change their colors, and migrant birds flock and prepare to move south. Harvest time is at hand. And the new arts season begins.

Our first event of the new arts season was Carolina Ballet’s performance last Friday of a program entitled Firebird. I was sorry to see the there were a good many empty seats. The audience is an important part of a performance. Those of us without dance training have a role to perform — that is, the audience role, absorbing and responding. I always feel like a better person after the ballet, with posture at least temporarily improved.

Why were there empty seats in Fletcher Hall? I do not know. People squander their precious life hours on the most amazingly nonsense yet pass up such richness close at hand. At any rate, those who made it were well rewarded. There were strong new works by Weiss and Bourtasenkov, as well as the repertory masterpiece set to the great Stravinsky score. And of course, the incredibly talented, disciplined, beautiful dancers.

As a Mahler fan, I was especially interested in Weiss’s new Sturmische Liebe, a pas de deux to a Mahler chamber piece with Lara O’Brien and Alain Molina. It was taut and tragic to the danger point, as though the end of love could only mean the end of life. It seemed to draw on the spirit of tango. I admired Lara’s intensity and her total immersion in the character, which was so somber that I briefly forgot it was acting and worried she might be a danger to herself.

I also particularly enjoyed the very different new Weiss piece Moving Life, a non-story to three enigmatic works by Erik Satie. Part of the music, the Gymnopedies, was familiar to me from a marathon performance I helped with years ago, and I went home after the show and ordered the sheet music online from Sheet Music Plus. Peggy Severin Hansen was again magnificent as the Firebird, in many regards birdlike — astonishingly light and quick, yet elegant and powerful.

Sal and I spotted Lola Cooper at the second intermission with a cast on her foot. She greeted us warmly and brought us up to date on her news. She’d had surgery a few weeks before to address a congenital bone problem. She seemed upbeat about the good progress she was making on her rehabilitation. It has to be so difficult for a dancer with such dedication to be sidelined even for a few weeks.

After the performance, Sally and I parted temporarily, she to hunt for her Mini Cooper and I my Clara. There was a street fair on Wilmingstreet called SparkCON. I spent a few minutes watching performers dancing with fire to African drumming. I couldn’t figure out how a flaming hula hoop didn’t case burns. It was fun to see the street performers, and I would have given them a few dollars if they’d asked.

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September 18, 2010

Freedom, my Provo novel, and TCI diving

I used to think of reading novels as a basic necessity, like food, water, and shelter. Novels were also my friends. Some were fun, some were wise. Reading novels was necessary, I thought, to build a conscious mind.

Beginning in my mid-teens, I took on, in no particular order, a lot of big classics, including Russians (viz Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky), Brits (Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Elliot, Hardy, Joyce, Woolf), French (Proust), Germans (Mann), and Americans (Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wharton, James, Wolfe, Faulkner, Salinger). In the seventies and eighties, I read many great books of the previous or current generation, including Nabokov, Roth, Updike, Heller, Cheever, Naipaul, Pynchon, Bellow, Vonnegut, Stone, DeLillo, Gardner, Kennedy, Davies,and Millhauser. At times I had enthusiasms for genres, including espionage (Le Carre), hard boiled (Chandler), mysteries (Christie), sci fi (LeGuin), historical (P. O’Brien), and horror (King). And on and on.

And then it was over. I didn’t suddenly stop reading, but at some point it was no longer necessary for me to have a novel near to hand. No, it was worse than that: I lost my faith in novels. I was no longer sure they were a good investment. Perhaps it was because of new circumstances in my life (too busy? but I was always busy), or maybe the change reflected a shift in the larger culture. Could the era of literature be ending? I’m not sure. But in bookshops, when I looked at the fiction shelves, instead of seeing endless exciting possibilities, as I used to do, I was struck by the opposite — masses of books that, I felt, would probably do nothing for me.

I shifted my non-professional reading diet to mostly history, biography, science, and journalism, along with poetry. I began applying a tough filter for taking on fiction: only books that I thought might be transformative or unforgettable make the cut. I continued to find such ones from time to time (McEwan, T. Wolfe, M. Amis, Spencer, Roth, Eugenides, Shteyngart, Yates). But not every day — or week, or month.

A couple of weeks ago I found another. For Labor Day weekend, Sally and I took a diving trip to Providenciales, Turks and Caicos. I’d just read the first rapturous reviews of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, and decided to pick it up in an airport bookshop. On the trip down, it was nowhere to be found (though it was in the front of all airport bookstores by the following weekend). Therefore, I went to Plan B. As soon as we got to Provo, I downloaded it onto the iPad — my first contemporary enovel.

It is a great book for a long sandy beach with palm trees, blue skies, and turquoise water, but also a great book for a long plane trip, or extended insomnia. It contains multiple lives, with problems you know well (like painful family relationships, loneliness, global environmental disasters), in settings you know well (various American cities) but have never seen from these angles. It requires no conscious effort, though you pause now and again to note the incredible craftsmanship (no visible strings or joints). Reading it is like living a different life. And when you emerge, it makes you grateful to have your own life.

On our diving days in Provo we left the Royal West Indies hotel at 8:00 a.m. and returned around 3:00, after two dives and a good number of nautical miles. Then, exhausted, we’d sit on the beach or by the pool and read for long periods. From time to time, we’d take a dip to cool off or have a rum drink. It was sweet.

Of course, not perfect. My new reading technology, the iPad, did not work in direct sunlight, so I read some paper books as well. I also had to address some diving technology glitches. On day two, I decided to try to perfect my weighting, which required obtaining more lead from the boat, which required swimming against the current, which led to falling behind the group and working to catch up, which led to over exertion, overuse of oxygen, mild narcosis at 100 feet, problems reading gauges, an out-of-air emergency, sharing air with Sal, and, back on the boat, loss of all stomach contents. On another dive my octo malfunctioned and started rapidly dumping air. We had to abbreviate that dive, but had some good sightings.

We had close and rewarding encounters with several reef sharks, sea turtles, barracuda, and countless luminous small fish. Unfortunately, we saw many lion fish, which are spectacular looking but poisonous and horribly destructive of the reef ecosystem. In areas, the coral was dead, a ghostly white. But there were large, healthy areas, with bizarre shapes and bright colors of otherworldly beauty.

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August 29, 2010

Ebooks and charity ideas

This week I went to Dallas and back twice. I will not complain, except to note that long periods confined in small seats do not get easier as the hours pass. I sat next to a fifteen year old kid on the way back, who, by the end of the flight, was writhing in discomfort, and I remembered how this was even tougher when I was younger.

I spent some of the seat time reading my first ebooks on my iPad. As a confirmed bibliophile, I doubted I would really like ebooks, but my compulsion to have handy several books when I travel has created problems with weight limits, and pushed me towards trying this lightweight solution. Using the Kindle software, it took me just a few minutes to fall in love with the format. I like the typeface and type size, the ability to highlight and annotate, and the light weight.

My first ebook was Against Intellectual Monopoly, by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, an against-the-grain discussion of the problems with our patent and copyright systems. I was gratified to see a discussion of Red Hat as a primary example of why patents don’t achieve anything close to their intended purpose in the software area.

It’s interesting how ideas can seem particularly interesting during cross-country flights, and how frequently new ones pop up. I found myself thinking about an NPR story from last week about individuals who commission new pieces of music or plays. The point of the story was that the cost could be shared with others and spread over time, so that being a patron and bringing a new piece of art into the world could be more affordable than you’d think.

I really liked the idea of contributing in a direct and immediate way to new art. If I can’t be a composer, perhaps I could help in the creation of music by funding one. So, how about a web site to allow composers, choreographers, or others to propose commission-worthy projects, and donors likewise to seek suitable artists? Sort of an arts-funding Craigslist. Sure, it could be there’s just not sufficient interest, but then, not so long ago Craigslist sounded like a fantasy.

The web today is a big part of my life, and of the lives of most people I know. In almost no time it’s gone from a novelty to a utility, and now I take it for granted much like the interstate highway system. Yet we may have just begun to scratch the surface of what it can do — things that go way beyond shopping and entertainment. Facebook and Twitter haven’t really inspired me, but they point in the direction of more immediate and wide-ranging connections that have more human meaning. It could reduce the barriers to charitable giving by making needs and resources easier to see and connect.

For example, it’s hard for me to visualize the enormous suffering from the current flooding in Pakistan, and hard to feel like there’s much I can personally do about it. But if I could connect with a person who’s lost everything and understand their story using web multimedia, it could help me, and I suspect others to open their hearts and wallets. People who’ve lost everything can’t easily get online, of course, but the tools that could get them there already exist. It would take some thought and energy. This could be an open source project.

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August 22, 2010

Good sports

Last Friday I reached my latest swimming objective: 1500 meters of freestyle without a break. This was for me, a considerable achievement, which not so long ago I found almost impossible to imagine. I’ve been doing a 1500-meter workout for some months, but with 30 second breaks at various intervals. A few weeks back, I decided to work towards doing the distance non-stop. I began gradually reducing the breaks, from 10, to 5, to 3, to 2, and finally to 1. Then, finally, none.

On Saturday morning I did an hour and a half of Vinyasa yoga in an open level class at Blue Lotus with Yvonne. That’s a lot of yoga! I tried very hard not to look at my watch, but once I was well drenched with sweat, I checked to see if we were almost done — and we were only half way through. I still can’t figure out at all why this strange system works, but it does: I felt absolutely wonderful at the end.

That evening Sally and I went out to Zebulon to see the Carolina Mudcats play the Mobile Baybears. It was a warm but not sweltering night, and we had great seats — a few yards beyond first base on the first row, close to the visitor’s bull pen. From this close in view, we could see how fast they run, how hard they throw, and generally how amazing they are. This is AA-level baseball, where the players are serious contenders for the big leagues. The pitchers were throwing fastballs in the mid-90s, and I don’t think I saw any errors. There is something really pleasing about seeing a real life high-quality baseball game on an August evening. The competitive drama is involving, but the whole experience is also relaxing. It’s good to have a beer and slice of pizza, listen to the buzz of the crowd, the organ, the announcer, the crack of the bat. It was a good, close game, which Mobile won 2-1.

When I stop to think about it, it amazes me how much I’ve changed with regard to physical activity and sports in recent years. As a kid, I played the usual sports, and used to imagine that I would play well one day, but in competition I never managed a level much higher than average or worse. And gradually, I came to think of myself as a non-athlete and sports-phobe. Particularly during adolescence, it was annoying to see the social advantages (in particular, success with girls) that accrued to the gifted athletes. I looked forward to adulthood as a time in which sports and athletics would be no longer relevant, and my lack of any particular athletic giftedness would cease to be a liability.

In retrospect, I can see this was partly a problem of lack of time. Part of the problem with athletic skills and kids is the same as with academic skills, which is that kids learn at different rates. This is kind of obvious, but schools are not set up to address accommodate different rates of learning. Instead, a class is given a set time in which everyone must master a set of skills, and those who are slower are shamed and punished. And those slower kids eventually figure out how to avoid the painful activity, perhaps by dropping out. While I was generally one of the quicker kids at mastering schoolwork skills, I was not so in sports. Because of my July birthday, I was always one of the youngest in the class, which was part of the problem. But of course, I had no idea of that issue at the time. I just knew that my relative lack of success in sports was somewhat painful. Like other slow learners, I eventually opted out.

Fortunately, over the years, I’ve found that the level of mastery needed for enjoyment of many activities activity is not impossibly high and with no tight time deadlines I’ve reached that level in some things I really enjoy. This has been the trajectory with swimming, skiing and golf, and I’m starting to see the outlines of that level of accomplishment for yoga. Slow and steady wins the race.

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August 19, 2010

Robert Frost and my new iPad

I’ve finally managed to memorize The Wood Pile, by Robert Frost. http://tiny.cc/zlasu It’s a strange, bleak poem, about walking through a frozen swamp and not seeing very much, except snow, trees, a bird and a decaying wood pile. Just as the narrator doesn’t really know why he keeps walking deeper into a frozen swamp, I’m hard put to explain why I went to the considerable trouble of memorizing this poem. It’s difficult to picture an ordinary situation in which anyone would voluntarily listen to a recitation with pleasure. But memorizing it entailed many many readings with close examination of every word, and through that process the poem gradually revealed a stark startling beauty.

At the end of the poem, the narrator wonders at the isolated decaying wood pile, and remarks that the person who made it must be “someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks” so as to “forget his handiwork on which he spent himself, the labor of his ax.” It may be that the laboriously created, carefully measured, woodpile is one of Frost’s poems, and that Frost is pointing up the minor tragedy of art that fails to reach its audience. He also seems to be saying that remembering can be harder than creating. It isn’t hard to see that we all constantly live in eagerly turning to fresh tasks and also, without realizing it, forgetting other valuable things.

Yesterday I turned to the fresh task of learning how to work my new iPad. It is a very pleasing little device both in form and function — light, sleek, quick, uncomplicated, but sophisticated. I got it mainly to use as a reader and a web surfer, though it may turn out that other functions, like the video viewer or some game, will turn out to be useful to me. To get started, I put some of my favorite poetry on the Kindle reader, including W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Frost, thinking it would be a comfort to have them along in my travels. I also felt it would be worthwhile to always have handy some Proust, and downloaded Swann’s Way.

Within a few minutes I’d figured out how to make the Kindle reader application do some interesting things, like go to the table of contents, jump to a given page, highlight text, make a note on the text, and change the typeface of the work. This was mainly a matter of touching the screen in various ways, some of which were not immediately obvious. Experimenting with it was fun.

It’s remarkable how learning how to work new devices (sometimes hardware, but most often software) is now a constant feature of modern high tech life. In days gone by, a new device might come into my life every few months, but now it’s more like every few hours. The concept of the iPhone, and probably the iPad, includes encouraging the constant addition of more and more apps. Each app has at least a small learning curve, which consumes some amount of human energy.

Other than causing fatigue, do the apps do anything? The best thing they do is speed up information gathering. Whether the subject is world politics, scientific research, movies, or restaurants, it’s possible to get information faster. This could lead to better decisions. The problem is that our brains can only go so fast and only hold so much. Like John Henry racing to put down rails against the steam hammer, we can’t possibly keep up with the pace of our powerful computers.

So we have to figure out when to say, basta! On any given day, we have to be careful about turning to too many fresh tasks and forgetting what is really valuable. We have to quit downloading apps all the time and read something beautiful and profound, like Frost or Proust. Small, slow, and error-prone as our brains are, we need to protect and care for them and nourish them well.

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August 15, 2010

A musical dinner party

We had a small dinner party on Saturday night for some old friends. Sally put a lot of thought and work into the food, and I organized the music, including both recordings and some of my own piano playing. I’ve come to think that a musician’s work is inherently social. This isn’t completely obvious, since so much of the work consists of individual, solitary practice. It is possible to enjoy music alone, although even this has a social aspects, since it involves interacting with the musical ideas of others (composers, editors, previous performers).

But a musician’s conception that doesn’t get communicated is not quite complete. It’s like a meal prepared with infinite care which no one tastes. Listeners complete the musical circuit that runs from abstract idea to human emotion. Just as a meal is just an abstraction if it isn’t eaten, a musical conception isn’t really music until someone listens.

So I was happy that our friends let me share with them some of my musical ideas regarding Chopin and Debussy. I played the Minute Waltz, the D flat Nocturne (Op. 27, No. 2), and Clair de Lune, and managed to make some beautiful sonorities. There were some memory lapses, which I was not pleased about, but I recognized them as minor and didn’t get discombobulated.

Having listeners always changes the musician’s mental processing. It can cause greater inspiration and concentration, but it also causes greater stress, and sometimes system failure. The possibility of losing one’s grip and falling is part of the business of climbing, and the possibility of losing one’s place is part of the business of musical performance. It is strange, though, when it happens. The keys suddenly look completely unfamiliar, and the hands are paralyzed with uncertainty. It’s a terrible feeling. But it happens, and the only thing to do is move on. Despite the problems, I was glad I made the effort, and grateful to my listeners for completing the musical circuit.

Sally’s cooking was delicious, and there was plenty of laughter and lively conversation. Tony Judt, the historian and author of Postwar (a great book about the aftermath of WW II) who died of ALS last week, once said that talking was the point of adult experience. It certainly is a great pleasure to talk with kindred spirits about things we care about passionately.

At work last week I took a short class on the subject of “crucial conversations,” which was about how to communicate better when stakes and emotions are high. The class included a little film by a middle schooler who replicated Solomon Asch’s conformity experiment. In the experiment, the subject is told that there is a test of visual perception, and asked to compare the length of one straight line to another. The subject hears several people who are secretly in on the experiment give answers that are clearly wrong, and then, most often, agrees with the clearly wrong answer. The point is, most people go along with the group, even when they think the group is wrong. Those who are willing to trust their own perceptions and buck the group are a minority.

Why does this happen? Is it intellectual insecurity? The fear of being ostracized? It’s possible to imagine a certain evolutionary advantage might accrue to those that maintained stable groups with uniform, though wrong, ideas, so that their band was more effective in hunting, say, the woolly mammoth. But it’s also possible that a huge evolutionary disadvantage from group think that prevented admitting and addressing such global problems as the disastrous war on drugs or global warming from CO2 emissions.

Whether we admit it or not, we all struggle with the pressure to conform to the group, but some of us put up more of a fight than others. Our friends would probably be in the minority of Asch’s test subjects that was willing to go against the grain and voice their true thoughts. It makes for much more lively conversation. Before we knew it, four hours had flown by, and it was time to say good night.

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August 14, 2010

Good wine food and a note on spinning

Last night Sally and I tried a new “wine restaurant” in Cameron Village called Cafe Caturra. I wasn’t entirely sure what a wine restaurant was, but they pulled off the neat trick of creating (at least for me) a natural, comfortable new category. A young waitress greeted us and told us we could sit anywhere (it wasn’t crowded) and order food, but we might first want to stop by the bar and choose a glass of wine.

The bar was tended by a tall, friendly guy who showed the wine-by-the-glass choices — ten or so whites and as many reds. As soon as we expressed interest in one of the Chardonnays, he produced a taste of the wine, which was buttery and delightful, and we happily ordered a glass. Then we found a table and ordered — a veggie panini for me and a little pizza for Sally. These were simple, hearty, and delicious. I liked the servers and the artsy bistro look of the place. I wasn’t crazy about the background music — hard rock, my least favorite genre — but it wasn’t overwhelming.

The music was several times louder at my two spinning classes at Rapid Fitness earlier in the week. Sally asked me how I liked it, and I told her that I liked the second one better, when I knew to bring ear plugs. These were my first ever spinning experiences, and I was a little anxious going in, as with anything new. The only thing I knew about spinning was that it involved riding a stationary bike, which seemed like such a simple idea that I had trouble believing people would give it a particular name or do it together. Since it had a name and a following, I figured there were also rules and norms, and of these I knew nothing. Was it possible to screw up spinning? I didn’t know, and since this was a group activity, I worried just a little.

Fortunately I managed to get to class a few minutes before the 6 am start time and have a brief orientation chat with Paul, the teacher. He showed me how to set up the bike adjustments and gave me the lowdown on bike shorts and shoes. He also recommended that I pick a bike near the fan, because we were going to be sweating. He suggested that since I was new, I might find at points that I needed to gear back a little from his recommended intensity. I thought this was both mildly insulting and probably wrong, since I couldn’t see hnow a stationary bike could be all that serious a fitness challenge. But boy, was he right.

A few minutes later a group of eight or so had assembled. Paul put on a microphone, fired up the dance music, and told us to get going. For the next hour he combined straightforward coaching (“now, crank it up”), cheerleading (“you’re doing great!”), and a story line about a bike ride over three mountains (“the group ahead is looking back and sees you’re gaining on them”). After twenty minutes my heart was pounding, I was drenched in sweat and considering the real possibility that I would not make it through a full hour. Following Paul’s tip, I eased back a little, then found some more energy, and ramped back up. At the end of the class, even my shoes were soaked. As my heart rate got back to normal, I noticed an unusual mellow, light feeling — the endorphins of happiness. I did a few minutes of yoga breathing and stretching, and felt really good.

So, spinning turned out to be a kick-butt workout and more fun than expected. I considered whether my well-settled idea that I was not the sort of person who likes exercise classes might be simply wrong. At any rate I was happy to find a new activity to vary the mix of my morning exercising. It’s good to change things up.

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August 7, 2010

First Friday

Last night was First Friday, Raleigh’s monthly celebration of its downtown food, music, and art scene.  Despite the heat wave, thousands of people were out.  At Moore Square, there was a two-girl circus act in which one lay on her back, legs raised,  and the other got on top and balanced in various ways with a big smile.  In City Market, there was an oldies rock band, and the listeners were mostly middle-aged.  But at Art Space, there was a thick crowd of twenty-somethings, many with unsettling tattoos.

Sally and I had dinner at Gravy, which features reliable Italian comfort food in a hip brick-walled and oak package.  Among other things, we talked about the problem that large food portions served in most restaurants pose for American eaters.  Partly because of too many business meals recently, I’d again picked up three pounds I didn’t want to carry about. This inspired my latest eating experiment:  cutting off about a third of my food before beginning to eat, and leaving that third on the plate at the end.  The eggplant pie (thin breaded eggplant with marinara and ricotta) was really tasty, but more than I needed, and I’m sure I’d have eaten it all if I hadn’t established a visible stopping place.

I was taught as a child not to leave food on my plate, which was supported with the moral note that children were starving in Africa.  It did not occur to me until much later that the tragedy of starving children was not going to be mitigated by over-eating, which would itself cause obesity, illness, and premature death.  But changing those early ingrained eating habits requires more than recognizing their lack of justification; you have to replace them with other, better, habits.  We’ll see if this cut-a-third system works.

After dinner we looked in some galleries and then strolled back to our neighborhood.  We stopped at Second Empire and had cocktails in their classic bar.  It turns out that stop lights that are mistimed and clog traffic are one of Sally’s pet peeves, and we discussed them for a while.  We got back to our building around eleven.  Just a few steps from our door, in front of the Still Life club, there was a lively scene, with girls with high heels, long legs, and very short black dresses coming or going.  Sally noted as she took Stuart out for his last pee of the day that she wanted to have another look at those dresses.

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August 4, 2010

Benjamin Franklin, my hero

Benjamin Franklin is my favorite founding father.  There are chapters in the lives of others that I admire — Washington’s bravery, Jefferson’s eloquence, Madison’s political vision — but even these giants had glaring flaws and failures.  But Franklin’s life as a whole is extraordinary, with many varied chapters — printer, author, scientist, inventor, politician, revolutionary, diplomat.  He was, truly, a Renaissance man.

I’ve been reading, or re-reading, his Autobiography.  I have a memory of reading it as a sixth grader, but the book must have been a simplified and expurgated children’s version.  Franklin’s writing is mostly plain and direct, not much concerned with literary effect.  His writing hurries toward his main objective, which is to tell what he has learned about how to live.  He believes unequivocally in the virtue of hard work, honesty, frugality, and temperance.  He very much wants to communicate the value of these habits and attitudes.  But he does not appear dour or gloomy.  Rather, he seems mostly cheerful.  He strikes me as lively and always curious, a person who enjoyed both people and ideas, who had fun.

How did he manage to be so accomplished and productive?  I think a large part of it was due to the old-fashioned virtues he promotes, like diligence and honesty.  The man worked very hard and mostly kept to the straight and narrow.  But another quality, which he does not (at least so far as I’ve read) discuss, was also important: unselfish caring.  Franklin cared about other people, both as individuals and as communities, and dedicated much of his life to helping them.  He was generous with his gifts.  That generous spirit made him a happy, productive person.

In the Autobiography, Franklin does not conceal his moments of weakness and mistakes.  He’s human — but a really remarkable human.  I’ve been realizing how much his example impressed me as a child and influenced my development.  For a role model, one could do much worse.

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