Ouch!

Gail Collins, in her column titled The Revenge of Lacey Davenport, in Saturday's New York Times, wrote:

Long, long ago, Mick Jagger used to say that he couldn’t picture singing rock ’n’ roll when he was 40. His message, obviously, was not that the Stones planned to retire, but that Mick planned on remaining in his 30s forever. That which we cannot change, we ignore.

"Lacey Davenport" is a Doonesbury character thought to be based on the late Millicent Fenwick, who was elected to Congress from New Jersey at the age of 64, which at the time (1974), Ms. Collins observes, was considered "a geriatric triumph." She then adds: "These days, of course, as the first baby boomers are pushing 64, it’s regarded as part of the prime of life."

Well, of course it is. We boomers are a cohort of Jean Brodies, all in our prime:
Which, I suppose, is why, when I see a guitar store window, I pause and look longingly at those sleek Fender Strats and Teles, those gorgeous Gibson Les Pauls; why I'm distracted at the dry cleaner's by a poster offering guitar lessons. To quote the Beach Boys, It's not too late... .

Update: Ted Burke suggests (see comments) blues harp as a perhaps more attainable alternative to guitar heroism. Actually, I have an exemplar in that regard: one of my wife's friends' father, a septuagenarian living in the suburbs of Buffalo, who took up harp late in life and now bids fair to be the Sonny Boy Williamson of the Niagara Frontier.

Bonus: Hear and see Ted play blues in G here.

A tale of two stadia.

Anyone who's known me, or read this blog, for any length of time knows this if nothing: I love the Mets; I hate the Yankees. I've loathed the Bronx Bullies since I was in fourth grade, in an elementary school in the panhandle of Florida, when all of my  classmates were cheering for them and I, advocate that I was for the lowly and despised, knew the joy of seeing the underdog Brooklyn Dodgers defeat them in the World Series. I became a Mets fan in 1985 when a friend took me to a game at Shea, after a long baseball latency period precipitated by the Dodgers' move to L.A. During the course of that game, in which the Mets beat the Cards thanks to a dinger off what, that year, was called Howard Johnson's "unlikely bat", my friend, a Brooklyn native, said, "What you've got to remember is that the Mets are really the Brooklyn Dodgers continued by other means." That was enough to re-ignite the flame.

Nevertheless, as both teams play their final seasons in their long-time home venues, it's Yankee Stadium that I mourn, not Shea. To be sure, I've spent more time at Shea, and experienced more vivid emotion (mostly, I'm afraid, of the negative variety, but some moments of surpassing joy) there than in the older stadium in the Bronx. But, as most Mets fans will readily allow, Shea (photo at left above) is a charmless place. It's a product of the most dismal era of American architecture, the early 1960s, which produced such monstrosities as the Cadman Plaza apartment complex that looms over the northeastern flank of my beloved Brooklyn Heights. Painting Shea's walls blue only seemed to make matters worse.

Yankee Stadium (photo at right above), while graceful compared with Shea, has grown somewhat ungainly with recent revisions and additions. Its original facade, in a streamlined neoclassical style, is pleasing but unspectacular. What makes it special for me is its continued existence as a token of an era before my living memory. Shea was completed when I was a university student. Yankee Stadium, completed 23 years before I was born, was always the "House that Ruth Built". Babe Ruth, who died when I was two, was simply the most famous, and most charismatic, baseball player of all time. Most of his career was as a Yankee, and that's how he's remembered, but he came to fame with the Red Sox and made his last living appearance in a baseball uniform as a coach for the Brooklyn Dodgers. More than just a superb player, the Babe was a rare character. Herewith two of my favorite Ruth non-baseball anecdotes:

1. The Babe was invited by a New York society matron to be the guest of honor at a dinner party. Ruth's publicist subjected him to a Henry Higgins-like crash course in proper speech and manners. Like Eliza Doolittle, the Babe's first venture into high society rated an "excellent" for form but with a cautionary note for content. When the hostess passed a serving dish to him, he smiled sweetly and said, "No thank you, Ma'am. I never eat asparagus; it makes my urine smell."

2. A few months after Pearl Harbor, the Babe was to be interviewed live on a network radio show. At that time, it was imperative to relate everything to winning the war, so the host told Ruth that his first question would be, "Babe, how do you think sports can contribute to the war effort?" He had helpfully prepared an answer for Ruth to give: "Well, Bob [or whatever his name was], as the Duke of Wellington said, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton." They practiced this a number of times, until the Babe seemed to have it safely in memory. But when they went live, and the question was asked, Ruth said, "Well, Bob, as Duke Ellington said, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Elkton." After the show, the host said something like, "Gee, Babe, I thought you had that down pat. Why did you change it?" Ruth said, "Well, you see, I never met this guy Wellington, but Ellington, I know him. And I've never been to Eton, but I married my first wife in Elkton, Maryland, and I'll never forget that place as long as I live."

If there's an event associated with Shea that might make it worthy of preservation, it would have to be this (Note especially John Lennon during the last song, "I'm Down", on which he plays keyboard. I can't recall a moving image of a person, other than as an actor in a drama, in such an unalloyed state of Dionysiac fury; though McCartney, surprisingly, gives him a run for the money.)

The Beatles - I'm Down Live At Shea Stadium - Aug 15th, 1965 from Isaac on Vimeo.

Faith

The opposite of faith isn't doubt; it's certainty.
-- Anne Lamott

Having come to the Easter season (I began writing this on the evening of Easter Sunday; it's now two weeks and one day later, but still within the liturgical Easter), it seems appropriate to review my Ash Wednesday post, and reflect on what's transpired since. In that post, I wrote:

As I've noted recently, I have great difficulty with the notion of "faith" as it is commonly understood in a Christian context; that is, as a willingness to suspend skepticism with regard to propositions that are not amenable to empirical testing.

This drew a response from Marcia Tremmel, wife of my old high school and college friend Allan, and herself a deacon of the Episcopal Church:

I'm not sure that's my idea of faith. I am not at all sure that God expects us to suspend our skepticism or to walk away from such empirical testing as our current levels of science and knowledge permit. Those levels move almost daily - just look at the physics we grasp now compared to 50 years ago. The Letter to the Hebrews defines faith as "being sure of what we hope for and certain of that which we do not see." (Hebrews 11:1) It doesn't say a thing about maintaining a blind and stubborn certainty about things our empirical observations have proved otherwise. To me, being sure of what I hope for and certain of what I do not see, is remembering that I (and you and all of us) are created in God's image, redeemed by the death of His Son, and sustained by the gift of the Holy Spirit. That, to me, is way bigger than any empirical testing done or not done, or that might become possible tomorrow or next week, so why not do that empirical observation? God's big enough to handle it.

The first syllable of 'remembering' is stressed because I'm thinking of the way my Vicar says the words of institution in the Great Thanksgiving - "do this in remembrance of me." He's stresses that syllable because he's trying to get across that we are not thinking about something that happened a long time ago, but bringing it into the present moment--into our lives today--anamnesis--right now. I catch it because I'm standing next to him at the Altar; the rest of the congregation I'm sure doesn't notice.

I remembered what Marcia had written to me during our Easter Sunday mass, when our Rector made the point about the resurrection not being some historical event, but something that is present for us and in us now. I still have trouble with the notion of a physical resurrection; indeed, I have a serious problem with the notion of "miracles" in general, and nothing that C.S. Lewis wrote on the subject seems convincing to me. (Update: I linked to Tattersall's article because his objections to Lewis's arguments in Miracles seemed pretty much in accord with mine, if better thought out. Now that I've had the opportunity to skim Darek Barefoot's response to Tattersall, I see that I'll need to revisit this issue in another post.) Nevertheless, the notion of "resurrection" as the remembrance of Jesus' teachings by his disciples, and by the heirs of those disciples down to the present and into the future, does not run afoul of that objection. Others might cavil that this provides the basis for only a denatured form of Christianity, but more about that in a later post.

It was what Marcia wrote about the definition of "faith," however, that particularly caught my attention. When I read it, I realized that I had used a meaning that was at variance with something I had read many years ago. That was Paul Tillich's Dynamics of Faith. I got it from my bookcase and quickly found my definition skewered at the beginning of Chapter Two, "What Faith is Not." Under the heading, "The intellectualistic distortion of the meaning of faith," Tillich writes:

The most ordinary misinterpretation of faith is to consider it an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence. Something more or less probable or improbable is affirmed in spite of the insufficiency of its theoretical substantiation.

Tillich then distinguishes between faith and belief, the latter being based either on "evidence sufficient to make the event probable" or trust in some authority who has answers; that is, who has evaluated the evidence in a way I regard as trustworthy; much as I might trust the late Richard Feynman on the topic of quantum physics, or Jancis Robinson on what wine to have with roast duck. Such trust, however, is not the same thing as faith, because trust is conditional--if some other authority I respect publishes something that contradicts or modifies what Feynman wrote about quantum physics, I may decide to believe the new theory; if Ms. Robinson recommends a wine that I don't like, well, de gustibus non disputandum est--while faith is unconditional.

So, just what is this unconditional faith? According to Tillich, it is not knowledge.

Faith does not affirm or deny what belongs to the prescientific or scientific knowledge of our world, whether we know it by direct experience or through the experience of others. The knowledge of our world (including ourselves as part of the world) is a matter of inquiry by ourselves or by those in whom we trust. It is not a matter of faith.

In this respect, Tillich anticipated the late Stephen Jay Gould's argument for "nonoverlapping magisteria" or "NOMA"; that is, that the magisteria (teachings) of science and religion, as properly understood, cannot be in conflict because they address different spheres of human experience. As Gould put it:

The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the arch cliches, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.*

But this still doesn't answer the question: What is faith? Faith, for Tillich, means "the state of being ultimately concerned." What would it mean for Gould? My quick-and-dirty research has failed to uncover anything Gould wrote addressing that question. Gould proclaimed himself an agnostic, but not hostile to religion:

I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have enormous respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution, paleontology, and baseball).

(Now there's a man who had his priorities in good order.) Gould went on to write:

As a moral position (and therefore not as a deduction from my knowledge of nature's factuality), I prefer the "cold bath" theory that nature can be truly "cruel" and "indifferent"—in the utterly inappropriate terms of our ethical discourse—because nature was not constructed as our eventual abode, didn't know we were coming (we are, after all, interlopers of the latest geological microsecond), and doesn't give a damn about us (speaking metaphorically). I regard such a position as liberating, not depressing, because we then become free to conduct moral discourse—and nothing could be more important—in our own terms, spared from the delusion that we might read moral truth passively from nature's factuality.

I think that this passage indicates that Gould's "ultimate concern" (note the words "nothing could be more important") is the freedom of humans to determine the moral framework governing their lives through rational "discourse" rather than through revelation. While to many this seems the opposite of "faith," to Tillich it exemplifies a particular type of faith, specifically, a "humanistic" faith of the "moral" or "progressive-utopian" type. Of such a faith, Tillich writes:

The faith of the fighters for enlightenment since the eighteenth century is a humanist faith of the moral type. They fought for freedom from sacramentally consecrated bondage and for justice for every human being. ... It was faith, and not rational calculation, although they believed in the superior power of a reason united with justice and truth. ... As for every faith, the utopian form of the humanist faith is a state of ultimate concern.

Because it is "ultimate concern," it is faith; for Tillich, the only way to be without faith is to have no ultimate concern.

What is "ultimate concern"? According to Tillich, it is defined in Deuteronomy 6:5, the so-called "Great Commandment": "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." (N.R.S.V.)

This is what ultimate concern means and from these words the term "ultimate concern" is derived. They state unambiguously the character of genuine faith, the demand of total surrender to the subject of ultimate concern.

Yet it is obvious that it possible to have faith, even "genuine" faith in the sense of the demand for total surrender, in something other than the "Lord your God." At the beginning of Dynamics, Tillich gives two examples. The first, making reference no doubt to Nazi ideology but with application to jingoism anywhere, is a totalistic nationalism, and the second is "the ultimate concern with 'success' and with social standing and economic power."

It is the god of many people in the highly competitive Western culture and it does what every ultimate concern must do: it demands unconditional surrender to its laws even if the price is the sacrifice of genuine human relations, personal conviction, and creative eros. Its threat is social and economic defeat, and its promise--indefinite as all such promises--the fulfillment of one's being. ...When fulfilled, the promise of this faith proves to be empty.

Later, Tillich makes a similar, if somewhat qualified, assertion concerning humanistic or secular faith.

It is faith, but it hides the dimension of the ultimate which it presupposes. Its weakness or danger is that it may become empty. History has shown this weakness and final emptiness of all merely secular cultures. It has turned them back again and again to the religious forms of faith from which they came.

At this point, I confess to being a bit perplexed. I don't think Tillich is arguing here for the elimination or erosion of the separation of church and state. Rather, he seems to me to have asserted that a culture that is not informed by religious faith, even perhaps a plurality of faiths, has a fatal weakness. However, I wish he had given examples of "merely secular cultures" that had "turned...back...to the religious forms of faith from which they came." Perhaps some readers can help.

A more fundamental difficulty for me is defining the nature of that "ultimate" which, according to Tillich, is the proper--as opposed to idolatrous, like those discussed above--object of ultimate concern. According to the Great Commandment it is "the Lord your God." Here is where Tillich made a clever move:

The fundamental symbol of our ultimate concern is God. It is always present in any act of faith, even if the act of faith includes the denial of God. Where there is ultimate concern, God can be denied only in the name of God.

Well, OK. Tillich has already posited ultimate concerns--nationalism, success, humanism--that are not "God" as understood in religious terms. Suppose I were to say, as I believe Gould would have, that my ultimate concern is with human freedom to establish a moral order based on reason, and not on divine command. Would I be denying God in the name of God? To cut to the chase, what Tillich seemed to be saying is that whatever is our ultimate concern is, for us, God, and that, consequently, no one can be an atheist, or even agnostic, no matter what that ultimate concern may be. It all seems to me a bit, dare I say, tautological.

So where do I end up on all this? It would be easy if I could just state, "My ultimate concern is X." At my age, it should be a question I could readily answer. Not long ago, I would have given the same answer to that question that I hypothesized Gould's giving: that it is the freedom to determine the moral order through reason alone. I would have said that despite regularly attending church services. If pressed as to the sincerity of my religiosity, I would have given a flip answer (as I actually once did) like, "I'm just an ontological reductionist who gets off on good liturgy."

Today, I'm not so sure. The mere fact that I can "get off" on liturgy points to something: Tillich might have said it was an indication of a "sacramental" form of faith. I've sometimes been accused, with good reason, of wanting to have things both ways. Tillich's radical separation of faith from the empirical and Gould's NOMA give me some comfort in this respect. I like to say that my position is one of epistemological modesty. By this I mean that I retain a healthy skepticism about claims that are not readily testable, but also keep in mind, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."** There's a fine line between this kind of open-mindedness and credulousness, but I try to stay on the right side of it. At least, I hope that Archaeopteryx will concede that I still have functioning neurons.

Lastly, I must address the apparent conflict between the epigram at the start of this post from Anne Lamott, which I got courtesy of our Rector, Steve Muncie, and the words from Paul's letter to the Hebrews (11:1) quoted by Marcia. I like Ms. Lamott's statement that the opposite of faith is certainty because it seems in accord with my position of epistemological modesty. Yet Paul wrote of faith as being "certain of that which we do not see." On reading this, I was tempted to interpret it as meaning "certain that there are things that we do not see." This would mean a certainty of there being uncertainty, certainly in agreement with the modest position. Unfortunately, I don't have access to, or knowledge of, the original Greek, so I couldn't attempt my own exegesis. I looked to see how the verse was rendered in my Cambridge Study Bible (New Revised Standard Version), and found it was

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

The Cambridge scholars helpfully appended to this and the succeeding two verses*** this note:

The explanation of faith given here conforms in style to definitions in Greek philosophical writings, and the crucial terms, conviction and assurance, carry philosophical meaning as to how ultimate reality can be known. But the writer has made a crucial addition: faith is oriented toward the future and is grounded in the hope of fulfillment of God's purpose. The assurance is that the heavenly realities, which humans have not yet seen, will be revealed to God's faithful people, just as the ancestors looked forward to this reality. God's word, which was the instrument for shaping the creation...and the ages of history (worlds), is here seen as disclosing an eternal world which exists in the heavens but is not visible to humans.

(Emphasis in original; citations omitted.) Perhaps the crucial point here is that the certainty in question is "oriented toward the future" and "grounded in hope." This can be contrasted to the "certainty" of Biblical literalism, or fundamentalism, which is oriented towards the past (and which, I suspect, is the "certainty" that Ms. Lamott had in mind). (Biblical literalism is also, for Tillich, a form of idolatrous faith; a point I mean to take up in a later post.)

Over to you, Marcia (and anyone else who wants to chime in).

Update: Thanks to Archaeopteryx for linking to this post both on his blog and on the Faith-Based Fray, where it's already generated lots of discussion.
_________________________

*Gould recognized that, while the magisteria of science and religion do not overlap, there are important issues that implicate both:

Many of our deepest questions call upon aspects of both [magisteria] for different parts of a full answer—and the sorting of legitimate domains can become quite complex and difficult. To cite just two broad questions involving both evolutionary facts and moral arguments: Since evolution made us the only earthly creatures with advanced consciousness, what responsibilities are so entailed for our relations with other species? What do our genealogical ties with other organisms imply about the meaning of human life?

**Hamlet, I, v.

***These are

2. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval.
3. By faith, we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

Hebrews 11:2-3 (N.R.S.V.). The second clause of verse three may be a restatement of Democritus' atomic theory.

An important (ahem!) announcement.

I will be interviewed live tomorrow (Thursday, April 3) from 5:30 to 6:00 P.M. EDT on Sirius Satellite Radio, Indie Talk Channel 110, the "Blog Bunker" show.

For those of you who don't have Sirius receivers or haven't already signed up for Sirius Online, you can get a free three day trial of Sirius Online by going here.

Update: Things went so fast that I didn't get a chance to put in a plug for the other blog on which I participate, Brooklyn Heights Blog. Please give it a look, especially if you live in or near the Heights, are thinking of living in the Heights, used to live here and miss it, or were a big fan of the Patty Duke Show.

Mets, Santana, cruise to opener win.

I should worry about this.

It's what comes of being married to a Red Sox fan. The better they do early, you're told, the worse they'll do later.

Nice, though, to see newbies Church and Pagan contributing to the victory. And, the tab scribes won't yet be calling for Santana's head because he's getting four figures for every pitch.

4.1 update: April Fool's day sees yesterday's euphoria exposed for the fool's paradise it was, as Pedro's injury after a rough start means the two and three spots in the starting rotation must be filled by Maine and Perez, with the four and five spots taken by Pelfrey and who-knows-who.

Meanwhile, on the Times op-ed page, David Brooks offers this analysis of what makes for success in pitching, based on the work of sports psychologist H.A. Dorfman. Apparently, self-absorption is a serious hindrance.

A record month, thanks to the Times and Catnapping.

S-AB has set records during March for both visits and page views (1,116 and 1,578 respectively, so far) for a single month. This is largely because of two things: (1) a huge spike in traffic on the 18th when Patrick LaForge of the New York Times City Room blog linked to my post on Vampire Weekend; and (2) Catnapping's posting of an unusual birthday greeting (see below)

in her comment on my Ed Lenci gets shorn post, which has caused everyone who does a search in Google Images that incorporates the word "birthday" to be directed here. Many thanks!

Stanley Greenberg: the romance of infrastructure.

My earliest memories of New York City - I was five years old, staying with my mother at the old Henry Hudson Hotel on West 57th Street waiting to board a ship to cross the Atlantic and join my father, an Air Force officer who had been sent to England for a tour of duty - prominently include being awestruck by the magnificence of its public works. Yes, the skyscrapers, the bustling crowds, and the "Manhattan" the waitress served me at Longchamps (ginger ale with a dash of grenadine, garnished with a maraschino cherry, in a cocktail glass) were impressive, but so were the mighty pillars holding up the elevated West Side highway, and the piers jutting into the Hudson sheltering a phalanx of passenger and cargo liners. On later visits - I was through New York as a port of embarkation or debarkation three more times in my childhood - my experience grew to include the great East River bridges, with their soaring towers, tree trunk thick cables and stupendously massive anchorages, and the interior of the old Penn Station, an early twentieth century high-tech cathedral.

So it was that I came to love the photography of Stanley Greenberg, whose camera ventures into places where ordinary citizens do not or cannot venture, such as the interior of the Lower Gatehouse of the New Croton Dam, shown above. His books Invisible New York and Waterworks elegantly document this hidden or often overlooked infrastructure of the City and its environs.

My wife and I attended the opening reception for Stanley's current exhibition at the Gitterman Gallery. Among the photographs displayed were some of City infrastructure, others of buildings under construction, and others comprising a series showing sand castles on the beach at Coney Island. They thereby encompassed the enduring, the transitory and the evanescent. You can see images of the photographs included in the exhibition here.

The exhibition will remain open through May 10. Gitterman Gallery is located at 170 East 75th Street in Manhattan, telephone 212.734.0868 or see info@gittermangallery.com.

Ed Lenci gets shorn.

No, he wasn't heavily invested in subprime mortgage backed securities, or a major holder of Bear Stearns stock. As explained in this earlier post, Ed volunteered to have his head shaved to help raise money for children's cancer research through St. Baldrick's Foundation. So, on this St. Patrick's Day afternoon, Ed repaired to Jim Brady's, on Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan, to submit to the shears. Here he is, gamely awaiting his date with destiny:


He takes the fateful chair:


Going, ...


... going, ...


... gone.


Congratulations to Ed on his shiny new look, and thanks to all who made it worthwhile by contributing to St. Baldrick's.

Scenes from a morning walk through DUMBO.

Coast Guard cutter heading down the East River to take a position near Governor's Island. This happens whenever the President is due in town.

Women exercising Great Danes under Manhattan Bridge.

Looking southward along Anchorage Place and Pearl Street.

Looking southward along Adams Street.

Brooklyn Bridge from Plymouth Street.

Powerhouse Arena window.

Truck on Water Street.


There's more on DUMBO here.

Update: Thanks to Anonymous for correcting my geography. What I thought was Jay Street is actually Pearl (I checked a more detailed map to confirm), and it, along with Jay and Adams, actually runs north-south rather than east-west (my mistake here was in thinking that anything perpendicular to the East River must run east-west, but DUMBO lies next to a stretch of the East River that runs east-west instead of north-south). I've amended my text accordingly.

Oddest Google search to lead to a hit on my blog.

married nashville women wanted for casual sex

Sorry to disappoint.

Whither Spitzer?

Louise Crawford put the wood to me, at the delightful Brooklyn Blogade hosted yesterday by Joyce Hanson, AKA Bad Girl (we're talking "bad" in the probably now hopelessly archaic hip-hop sense). Anyway, amid all the bonhomie, Louise let me know in no uncertain terms that the volume of my production of late has been a bit less than up to snuff. All I could do was hang my head and nod "Yes."

So, I should certainly find something blogworthy in our (I'm referring to my fellow Empire Staters here) Governor's admission that he's shelled out major coin for some choice nooky. At first, I thought of trying to do something about how this provokes an intra-cerebral civil war between my classic liberal (what consenting men and women do in private, whether out of purely erotic or commercial motivation, is no one else's business, even if one of them happens to be a politician, televangelist or whatever) and Burkean conservative (prostitution is bad because it gives rise to conditions in which persons can be exploited without meaningful consent) sides. But that was going to demand a long essay, and I didn't have the energy or desire.

What I kept hearing was, "How could he be so stupid?" Stupid, I'll agree, but perhaps not in the sense of just failing to realize the risk. The phrase that kept repeating in my mind this afternoon was spoken by Maggie Smith playing the title role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: "Beyond the ordinary moral code." In the movie (and novel by Muriel Spark from which it was derived), Brodie is a teacher in a fancy girls' school in Scotland during the period just before World War Two, and a vulgar Nietzschean with fascist sympathies. One of her students is so beautiful, intelligent and talented that Brodie is convinced she is a true uberfraulein. In order to nudge this girl towards her rightful (as Brodie sees it) destiny, she connives for her to have an affair with the art teacher, a man in his thirties, married with six children. This all ends, inevitably, in disaster for both the art teacher and the girl. Brodie's excuse, of course, is that the girl was "beyond the ordinary moral code."

There are people who believe this about themselves. Some turn to overt crime: murder, rape, theft. We call them sociopaths. Others hew to more conventional career paths, and are often quite successful. Because this belief is strongly correlated with narcissism, some of them go into show business (of which televangelism is a part) or politics. Spitzer may exemplify the latter.

Alternatively, if we take seriously Spitzer's statement that his actions violate his, and anyone's, sense of right and wrong, we could conclude that there was, in his psyche, some desire for self-destruction.

How to answer the question in my caption for this post? That's a matter of practical politics, not philosophy. I suspect that the pressure from the Democratic Party in a presidential election year will prove irresistible: Spitzer will be out, and soon.

Update: There's an AP story that quotes several psychologists on the question, "Why do smart people do dumb things?" As you might expect, opinions vary, with some of the experts supporting a theory of hubris that is close to what I expressed above.

On the question whether Spitzer should resign, the lead Times editorial harrumphs mightily about it not being, as Spitzer asserted, primarily a "family" matter, but just calls for a more complete and public act of contrition, and does not demand his resignation. Comments on Instaputz (click on the word "Comments" to see them in Haloscan), including some by Brooklyn Heights Blog regulars, are generally taking the perfect-act-of-contrition no-resignation tack.

Second update: Newsweek's Howard Fineman has another theory about what motivated Spitzer. He thinks it may have been an inner conflict over his career as a politician. This brings to my mind a New Yorker cartoon by William Hamilton that depicted a sixtyish, besuited man sitting with several similar gents, all with drinks, in a club lounge, and saying, "Steel, of course, has been my life. But sometimes I wish my life had been a sunny cafe in Provence, with a pretty girl and a bottle of beaujolais."

Whither the Mets?

Celizic: The geriatric, injury-riddled Mets may be lucky to win eighty games this season.

Marchman: The Mets may have no serious competition in the National League. (Unfortunately, two of the most credible contenders, the Phillies and Braves, are in the Mets' division.)

Wake me in September.

Update: Nick asks if this means I expect the Mets to be "standing somewhere in between" come September. Well, let me put it this way: my estimation of the probability that the Mets will be at the top of their division in September is 25%; my estimation of the probability that they will be somewhere in the middle is 55%, and my estimation of the probability that they won't be standing at all is 20%. So, yeah, I guess I do.

The point of my post is kind of like that great Who song, "Won't Get Fooled Again." I don't want to go through the emotional ups and downs of last season, which got resolved into comfort by mid-August, then abruptly plunged into despair at the end of September.

Twiffer: I like roller coasters, too. In baseball, however, I'd rather not have that abrupt plunge at the end. (I know, Red Sox fans became inured to that; however, after two championships in three years, they may be starting to forget.)

Woman wanted for Vampire Weekend.

The opening page of Vampire Weekend's website has the following under "news":

The name of this band is Vampire Weekend. We are specialists in the following styles: "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa","Campus", and "Oxford Comma Riddim."

(Note the use of an Oxford comma in the second sentence.) In other contexts, however, they've called their musical genre "Upper West Side Soweto." Here they are doing "A-Punk":

Watching and listening to these guys, I can't help but think of another group that had phenomenal success beginning about thirty years ago, Talking Heads. (There's a short account of the one time I attended a Talking Heads concert here.)

Let's compare the two groups:

1. Fancy college degrees. Talking Heads: Yes. Vampire Weekend: Yes.

2. Twee lyrics. Talking Heads: Yes. Vampire Weekend: Yes.

3. Architectural references. Talking Heads: Yes. Vampire Weekend: Yes.

4. African pop influence. Talking Heads: Yes. Vampire Weekend: Yes.

5. Punk influence. Talking Heads: Yes. Vampire Weekend: Yes.

6. Foreign-born member. Talking Heads: Yes. Vampire Weekend: Yes.

7. Woman member. Talking Heads: Yes. Vampire Weekend: No.

So, it seems that VW lacks only one element of Talking Heads' formula for mega-success. Guys, you gotta getta gal.

Thanks to Homer Fink of Brooklyn Heights Blog for turning me on to VW.

Update: Homer has referred me to the MySpace page of another group with an Ivy League pedigree, Cambridge-based Chester French. "The Jimmy Choos" is a lively rocker that appeals to my inner shoe fetishist, and "People" sounds remarkably like Wild Honey period Beach Boys.

Second update: Perhaps providing support to Brain Tracer's theory about the psychic qualities of MP3 players, on my way home from my office my iPod played "And She Was" by Talking Heads, then followed it with VW's "Mansard Roof."

Lenci's locks must go! (But it's for a good cause.)

Friend and erstwhile colleague Ed Lenci is known, among many things, for having a fine head of hair. But, come St. Patrick's Day, Ed (who has Hibernian heritage on the distaff side) will repair to Jim Brady's, where a razor will sweep over his scalp, leaving him bald as a cue ball. The purpose of this exercise in aesthetic cruelty is to raise funds to fight something far more cruel: childhood cancer.

Ed and others have responded to the challenge made by St. Baldrick's Foundation, an organization which runs the world's largest volunteer-driven fundraising event for childhood cancer research. So far, its efforts have met with tremendous success: St. Baldrick's raised over $12 million in 2007 and, since its inception in 2000, has raised over $34 million. Its goal is to raise $17 million in 2008. (It has nothing to do with Baldrick in Blackadder.)

To make a donation and support Ed's sacrifice, go to St. Baldrick's website and click DONATE NOW. On the page that pops up, you will see spaces for entering Ed's name under the heading "Search for a Participant or Team." You need only enter "Lenci" in the appropriate box and hit "go." On the page that next pops up, you'll see Ed's photograph and below it the words "Donate now." Click "Donate now" and you will be taken to the page where you can make your donation securely using your Visa, Mastercard, Discover or American Express card. Donations to St. Baldrick's are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

The view from my window this morning.

Of course, "changing to sleet or freezing rain" is the prediction for later today. Too bad.

Where I've been.

I've been making up lots of excuses for not keeping the blog going, lately. My current one is that I recently acquired a new computer, and therefore have spent much of the last week installing software, transferring files, re-establishing lost or forgotten user names and passwords, and starting to learn the vicissitudes of Vista.

Bear with me, friends.

Another blogger has "disappeared".

I posted earlier about Fouad Al-Farhan, a Saudi blogger who was arrested and taken to an undisclosed location where he is being held incommunicado (now for 65 days) without any publicly announced charges against him, apparently for the offense of criticizing government officials. I've now learned that a similar fate befell a young (23) Syrian blogger, Tariq Biasi, who has been in custody for over six months. You can read about his case on the Global Voices Advocacy site. As with Fouad, there's a petition to free Tariq. The link is here. The text of the petition is given in both Arabic and English (scroll down) and, if you follow the link at the bottom that says "sign the petition", you'll find a box where you can add additional comments, if you wish.

Balder -- a red ship on a gray day.

It was a gray, gloomy morning Thursday when I was on my run through the Empire - Fulton Ferry State Park in DUMBO and saw, with my peripheral vision, something big and reddish-orange overtaking me off to my right. It was Balder, a self-unloading bulk cargo ship (in that respect an oceangoing version of the Great Lakes ships like Calumet that were the subject of an earlier post) belonging to the Norwegian Torvald-Klaveness shipping group, named for the Norse God of "light, joy, purity, beauty, innocence, and reconciliation", but flying the flag of the Marshall Islands and, according to this article, trading mostly among the east coast of the U.S., Canada, the Caribbean and South America. Below is a closer view of Balder's stern, showing the elaborate conveyor equipment used to handle cargoes like gypsum, salt and sand.

Lenten stuff 2

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden

-T.S. Eliot, from "Ash Wednesday"

An old friend, a lapsed Roman Catholic, used to call Ash Wednesday "All Loons' Day". Today, as last year, I've chosen to bear the mark of the loon, though I'm still beset by the same doubts as when I posted a year ago. This year I approached the liturgy of the ashes with some urgency. Ash Wednesday (and, indeed, the whole succeeding forty day Lenten season) is for Christians what Yom Kippur is for Jews: a time for atonement, and atonement is what I felt I needed, in spades. (I won't burden you with why.)

As I've noted recently, I have great difficulty with the notion of "faith" as it is commonly understood in a Christian context; that is, as a willingness to suspend skepticism with regard to propositions that are not amenable to empirical testing. This may simply be a manifestation of a strong anti-authoritarian streak.

While riding the subway to my office, I remembered that T.S. Eliot had written a poem titled "Ash Wednesday". I found it through a web search, and realized that it expressed, as exemplified in the lines quoted above, one aspect of Christianity that I endorse without hesitation: its embrace of paradox. Why this appeals to me is something I'll have to save for a later post.

Santana to Mets?

Although Twiffer congratulated me on the deal a couple of days ago, given the Mets' recent history I've been reluctant to post anything until the ink has dried on the pact. My caution seems to be in order; indeed, even if the contract gets signed, I should probably wait until Gomez, Humber, Mulvey and Guerra have passed their physicals. As any Mets fan knows, so many things can go wrong.

Update: As the article linked above now shows, contract terms were finalized before the extended deadline. So now I need only fret about the outcome of physicals. Or whether Santana will slip and break his pitching arm between now and the start of the season. Or whatever.

Here is Tim Marchman's analysis of the value of the deal to the Mets. Of course, I find the Billy Wagner quote scary.

Jensen Interceptor

Never as well-known as the Aston-Martin, and lacking a James Bond connection (although it did serve Simon Templar in The Saint), the Jensen was nevertheless a strikingly handsome and agile British (for a time it was built in Scotland) grand touring car. The Interceptor was powered by a Chrysler V-8, and some models featured an early adaptation of four-wheel drive to GT use.

Hello, anybody!

If you ain't got a shackle or a chain.

- John Stewart

Yeah, I've been going through another of those periods of blogger's block, where I keep coming up with ideas for posts, then mentally killing them. Anyway, I'll be back with something, soon. I've been chewing over this piece by Keifus. Then, I have some old, unfinished business with Archaeopteryx: not a disagreement, I might add, more like a midrash. Of late, I've also found inspiration from Publius, of Obsidian Wings.

Anyway, bear with me, and rattle my cage, if you please. I may post some place-holders along the way, but I'll have some substance for you before too long.

Three Cunard Queens in New York

On Sunday, January 13, all three of Cunard's great cruise ships: Queen Elizabeth 2, on one of her last voyages before going into retirement as a floating hotel in Dubai; Queen Mary 2; and Queen Victoria, on her maiden voyage, all entered New York harbor.


Above is Mary, docked at Pier 17, Brooklyn, located in the Red Hook neighborhood. This shot was taken at about 7:15 a.m. from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

That afternoon, I took the subway to West 59th Street in Manhattan, and walked over to the Cruise Ship Terminal, where QE2 and Victoria were docked.



Here's the bow of QE2, with the funnel and upper superstructure of Victoria looming over the pier to the south.


QE2 was bunkering at the time of my visit. This view shows the clean, "shipshape" lines of her superstructure (in contrast to those of newer ships like Victoria). It's hard for me to believe this ship has completed forty years of service, including being pressed into duty as a troopship during the brief but bloody Falklands War. Note the shadow of Victoria on QE2's superstructure.


Above is a view of Victoria. To my eye, the design of her superstructure, with the decks cantilevered outward like an inverted wedding cake, is not as pleasing as that of QE2. Improvements in hull design and more effective stabilization have allowed naval architects to design ships that look more and more like landlocked resort hotels. This has been a boon for the ships' owners, who can accommodate more passengers and provide more commodious public spaces in their vessels.

Note the small, twin-hulled boat just below Victoria's bow.

Here the boat, evidently used by crew members to inspect Victoria's waterline, is being hauled up by crane, to be stowed inside the ship's hull.
Finally, below is a view of Victoria's bow, with QE2's funnel in the background.

That evening, the ships left their docks and gathered near the mouth of the Hudson, just north of the Statue of Liberty, where they remained during a fireworks display before departing on their voyages. Unfortunately, lacking a tripod, I was unable to get any good photographs of this event, which I watched from the roof of my building.


This Dutch Site has animated views of QE2 and Victoria arriving at their piers, and also still photos of the fireworks. To see the latter, click on the word vertrek near the bottom of the page, then click on volgende to advance from one photo to the next.

Farewell to "The Third Bridge"

Two mornings ago, while on my customary early run through Brooklyn Bridge Park in DUMBO, I paused to take a photo of part of Osman Akan's "The Third Bridge" illuminated by the rising sun. "Third Bridge", which was installed last October, was due to be taken down today.

Johnny Podres, 1932-2008

"Millennium," yes; "pandemonium"!
Roy Campanella leaps high. Dodgerdom

crowned, had Johnny Podres on the mound.

- Marianne Moore, "Hometown Piece for Messrs Alston and Reese"

I've told before how and why the Brooklyn Dodgers became my first love in baseball, and that 1955 was my first remembered and defining World Series. So it's with particular sorrow that I read that Johnny Podres, winner of game seven of that Series, and of the Dodgers' first championship, and that over the hated Yankees, died today at seventy-five.

I'm glad, however, to see that Johnny's fellow pitcher from the '55 team, Don Newcombe, still lives, along with teammate Tommy Lasorda and former Dodger GM Buzzie Bavasi.

Update: Arch, in a comment on my parallel post in WikiFray, says Bob Gibson is for him what Podres was for me. I couldn't find a poem about Gibson, but I did find another blog with a link to an MP3 of my favorite baseball writer, Roger Angell, talking about Gibson. Anyway, Arch, I've got to admit: Gibson was simply the greatest pitcher of his era, and probably one of the five or so best of all time. Oh, yeah, and as I've said before, if I had to pick a team purely on aesthetics, the Cards would be my choice.

"Free Fouad" update: please sign the petition.

An earlier post called attention to the plight of Fouad Al-Farhan, a Saudi citizen and blogger who, just over a month ago, was arrested and is being held in an undisclosed location without any publicly announced charge against him. His only offense, apparently, was criticizing some government officials. This action appears to run counter to King Abdullah's own declared intent to allow greater freedom of speech and the press.

Ahmed Al-Omran, publisher of the excellent English language blog Saudi Jeans, has linked to his blog a petition to free Fouad. The link to the petition is here. Please follow the link and consider adding your name to mine and to the almost 900 (as of the time I write this) people who have signed and submitted it. Note that you may edit the words of the letter to suit your own taste or convictions (wimp that I am, I changed "demand" in the first line to "respectfully request", noting that it was addressed to high Saudi and U.S. officials).

Get to know Andrew Olmsted.

I recently did, if only by reading his words, and that's as much, unfortunately, as I ever will. He's dead. He was a blogger, like me, until a sniper's bullet found him a few days ago. A major in the U.S. Army, serving in Iraq, he had prepared a final message, which he entrusted to a friend to post to his blog in the event of his death. It's here, and I offer it without further comment on my part, which would be superfluous.

Well, OK, I will add this to the many good things being said about him: he was a Yankee fan who converted to the Red Sox. And, as he noted concerning the brevity of his life: "few of us are destined to make more than a tiny dent in history's Green Monster."

He suggested that the reader of his final post "put on a little 80s music (preferably vintage 1980-1984)"; so, for you, Andy, here's Joan Jett:



Kudos to Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings for being the caretaker and publisher of Andy's final post.

Update: Hilzoy has posted this on Obsidian Wings:

A member of Andy Olmsted's family has just written me to say that if people want to do something in honor of him, they can send donations to a fund that has been set up for the four children of CPT Thomas Casey, who served under Andy and was killed while trying to help him. The address is here:

Capt. Thomas Casey Children's fund
P.O. Box 1306
Chester, CA 96020

Thanks so much.

College football wrap-up: Tigers truimphant.

A thoroughly bizarre season, which started with a huge upset, and saw my alma mater rise briefly to glory in the AP and USA Today polls before falling to 23rd and then getting pounded by Oregon in the Sun Bowl, has come to what for me is a somewhat satisfactory conclusion with the Bayou Bengals' (for whom I've long had a soft spot) convincing victory over Ohio State, a team I've despised since the days of the loathsome Woody Hayes.

New York gets it again, and again ...

A month or so ago I was walking through a subway station when I saw a poster advertising the movie I Am Legend, showing Will Smith leading a German Shepherd along the Manhattan abutment of a ruined Brooklyn Bridge. Its center span is missing, and its main cables droop from the towers into the water. On the Brooklyn side, near where I live, the buildings (including, perhaps significantly, the tower housing the headquarters of the Jehovah's Witnesses) look intact, but lifeless. Above Will's head, under a gloomy, sepia-toned sky, are the words: "The last man on earth is not alone."

A few days ago, again in the subway, I saw a poster for a movie with the bucolic title Cloverfield; however, the scene on the poster was far from idyllic. It showed a decapitated Statue of Liberty, torch arm still aloft, and, beyond it, fires raging in lower Manhattan in the vicinity of my office.

Legend, it seems, is about a plague; a human-generated plague caused by a mutant measles virus made to combat cancer. Cloverfield is just a good old monster movie, though, no doubt, with more sophisticated special effects than say, the first New-York-gets-trashed movie I can remember seeing, the 1953 release The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, in which a gigantic amphibious dinosaur-like creature, Rhedosaurus, freed from arctic ice by a U.S. H-bomb test somehow conducted with the compliance of the Canadian government (oh, for those halcyon days when Louis St. Laurent was Ike's favorite golfing buddy), makes its way southward to its ancient hunting grounds, now inconveniently occupied by The World's Greatest City. In this respect, Beast prefigures the original 1954 Godzilla, also put into action by a nuke test, in which the creature trashes Tokyo (a 1998 remake had Godzilla attacking New York, thereby bringing things full circle).

I generally avoid movies that feature the destruction of, or even major damage to, the city I live in and love. I did make an exception for The Day After Tomorrow, but only because a friend plays a part in it. I had thought to make a list of such movies. For me, an especially gruesome example is Fail-Safe (1964), in which POTUS orders the thermonuclear vaporization of New York in order to convince the surviving members of the Soviet chain of command that we are sincere in saying that our obliteration of Moscow was just a mistake caused by a communications fiasco.

Anyway, I quickly realized such a list would be unmanageably long and probably still way short of complete. So, I invite you to submit your favorite examples. If you want to submit movies in which other prominent cities get laid waste, feel free. If anyone can confirm or deny the existence of a movie called The Creature That Devoured Cleveland, I'll be grateful. A quick Google search left the question unanswered.

Update: Somehow (probably because it was in the December 26 Times, which was part of a pile of papers waiting for us when we got back from Massena and which were gone through quickly), I missed Sewell Chan's piece on this very subject, in which he includes a list of movies in which New York is obliterated.

Some Stan Rogers for Dawn Coyote.

Dawn replied to my New Year's shout-outs, noting that my post on lake ships made her think of the song "The Mary Ellen Carter", as performed by Stan Rogers.


Here's Stan again, singing "Make and Break Harbour," from his first album, Fogarty's Cove, with a montage of fishing scenes:


Finally, here's a CBC piece showing the icebreaker Sir Wilfrid Laurier sailing in arctic waters, to the accompaniment of Stan's song, "Northwest Passage":