This is one of those afternoons when my #1 priority is to work on getting back in touch with my inner suburbanite. The weather is cooling off a bit, unfortunately, but it’s still gorgeous out. I’ve been running around being high-functioning, as usual, and am finally at a point where I can start to get the whole picture in better balance. The landscaping work wrapped up Monday night, and a magical garden awaits. I went to the Urban Farmer store in Richmond Annex today to get some drip irrigation supplies, and I have everything I need to make it all happen. But I’m tuning into garden mode, which means no pushing myself to be goal-oriented. It’s a dance.

I went to UC Berkeley this morning to renew my library card, a privilege I have access to as a member of the Alumni Association. It has been many moons since I’ve been up to the campus library, and today was my first time in the Bancroft Library’s research room. That’s where the university’s collection on Western Americana is housed. You can’t check out materials; instead, you fill out cards for the books or papers you’re interested in and give them to the circulation desk, where somebody goes and fetches them from the private reserve and brings them to the table where you’re sitting.

I submitted requests for two books on Contra Costa County history, a subject I’m interested in because I have deep family roots in the area. It took about fifteen minutes for them to come up, during which time I sat in a meditative state in the peaceful, wood-paneled room. Several students were quietly working away on their laptops. The room itself resembled some of the legal conference rooms I’ve been in, but the atmosphere was almost the diametric opposite. It was incredibly refreshing to sit in an environment where quality rather than quantity was the basis of the activity going on. I have no wholesale quibbles with commercialism, so long as there’s substance and integrity involved. Unfortunately, such niceties too often get swept aside when the rush is on for quick profits. I emphatically maintain that productive enterprises don’t have to be an either/or. Time spent in the scholarly realm helps recharge my battery after too many years of immersion in the opposite polarity.

President Obama formally kicked off his 2012 campaign today. I am totally on board with what he’s doing. This doesn’t mean I agree with how he has handled everything as president, but it does mean I think he’s an honest, intelligent human being who is acting in good faith to promote the kind of society I want to live in. There aren’t very many politicians I can say that about. So much of the rhetorical sniping against him on the left strikes me as coming from people who are confused about what it realistically takes for an individual to step into a system as complicated as the U.S. government and try to effect real change. I prefer my fantasies grounded in a hefty dose of reality, thank you very much. It makes for a more sustainable mode of being.

Yesterday I took the plunge and placed my first order with iTunes.  I’ve been meaning to do that for awhile, but have just been busy with other things.  I have long enjoyed making my own music compilations, starting with cassette tape mixes that I played while driving or working out at the gym. But the iTunes business model of being able to get single tracks without having to shell out for an entire album is a game-changer.

The catalyst was actually a catchy old song called “Smoke From a Distant Fire” that I wanted to get on my iPod but couldn’t find in record stores. I did some research and learned that it was a one hit wonder done by a couple of studio musicians who briefly formed their own band. It’s a fun piece of music with sophisticated lyrics – the refrain includes the line “Girl, your eyes have a mist from the smoke of a distant fire,” referring to the singer’s suspicion that his girlfriend is having an affair. I have learned enough about epic poetry form through my familiarity with J.R.R. Tolkien’s work to appreciate the sophistication of the rhyming of “mist” with the first syllable in “distant.” It plays real smooth.

I took advantage of the situation to compile a list of old favorites, and downloaded about thirty songs for my initial foray into this brave new world. I noted in passing how weird the whole consumer culture emphasis on instant gratification has become, but I’m picking my battles these days. It’s a fun new toy to play with, and that’s enough for now.

James Fallows has a nice piece in the current issue of The Atlantic on “Learning To Love the New Media.” It’s a lengthy but worthy read. What I particularly like are his emphasis on the importance of dealing with reality (what a concept!) and his discussion of historical context. Things are always in flux in a dynamic culture like ours, and tradition and old ways aren’t inherently superior to new ideas and modes (the opposite is also true). Just because people like to be entertained and have their assumptions reinforced doesn’t mean the entire culture is on a hopeless downward spiral to the lowest common denominator. There’s just a huge shakedown going on that is going to take time to play out. In the meantime, there are all kinds of hopeful signs that the demise of people’s taste for quality content has been greatly exaggerated. Bridging the false dichotomy of high culture/low culture that serves to keep stagnant institutions entrenched would be a good thing. Given our country’s revolutionary origins, it’s arguably beholden on us to make it happen.

I threw in the towel today and went and signed up for a gym membership. I’ve been relying on long, brisk hikes with the dogs out in the regional parks for exercise workouts, and that has mostly been fine. But the recent rains have significantly curtailed our ability to get out, and I’ve been crawling up the walls. I miss breaking out a sweat on the elliptical cross-trainers, and my neck and shoulder muscles are ready to get back on the resistance training machines. I never thought I’d be the type to be eager to go to a gym, but I guess change really is the order of the universe. I have an orientation session scheduled first thing Thursday morning, and I am SO into it!

9/7/02, Barcelona – I just got back from a long walk around the harbor. I’m glad I went. I met some Dutch people who had just sailed here from Holland. They came through France, over rivers and canals, not the long way around. This is similar to what I wanted to do originally, before I ran into the snag with the insurance policy. I wasn’t planning to come as far south as the Mediterranean, though.

They also had a larger and more expensive boat than I had been thinking of, about 10 or 11 meters and 20,000 Euros, while I was planning on a 7 meter, 3,000 Euro boat. I had a nice, long talk with them, and most of my fears and insecurities about European boating are really nothing to worry about. I am now more convinced than ever that my idea to live over here in Europe on a boat for part of the year is really as good as it appears to be. A person can come here and live a fairly comfortable and certainly more interesting life for about the same, and possibly even less, money than he could live like a mushroom in the States. A couple of partners could buy a floating summer palace and stay here in Europe for less than they foolishly squander on frivolous things like their wives’ silly extravagances.

Talk to ya later,

Herr Kaptan Willem van der Battle

I’m finding myself getting increasingly pissy these days about the appalling shallowness of the vast majority of what passes for public discourse in this country.  This is about something much deeper than just being a cranky member of the older generation.  A good faith dedication to bedrock principles such as truth and consistency was abandoned so long ago by so many that an entire generation has grown to adulthood with glaring misconceptions about the type of society we actually live in.  So the media and the blogosphere are filled with people pontificating about subjects on which their understanding of context is an inch deep at best.  Garbage in, garbage out.

The good news is that, as ever, there’s a minority that is genuinely committed to quality and integrity in their pursuit of knowledge.  There’s more of an open-minded receptivity to considering old subjects in new lights and from different angles than I’ve seen for quite awhile.  It’s refreshing, and long overdue.

“We desperately need complicated, deeply-reported, long form journalism about black people,” the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his excellent blog today. True dat, true dat.  We could also desperately benefit from complicated, deeply-reported, long form journalism about a whole host of subjects.  Let the games begin.

The cherry blossoms
have lost their fragrance.
You should have come
before the wind.

– Princess Shikishi (d. 1201)
translation by Hiroaki Sato

#3

So forlorn am I
that when I see a firefly
out on the marshes
it looks like my soul rising
from my body in longing.

– Lady Izumi Shikibu 
translation by Steven D. Carter