The Evolution of Thought

For countless millennia humankind lived in a mythological world.  We thought about the origins of things with a mixture of dream and fantasy.  Shamanism, the most primitive religion, was invented as a means of gaining some influence over the forces of a mysterious and frightening world.  When different shamans or, later, different religions came into conflict, the winner was the one whose advocates won the physical battle, because that victory supposedly demonstrated their power to influence real events.  That’s how Christianity came to rule the Roman Empire. 



Copernicus



Afterward, the European Mind languished in the Christian torpor for over twelve hundred years.  Then, suddenly, the roof fell in.  Less than half a millennium ago, in 1548, arguably the most important year in human history so far, an amazing thing happened.  A couple of men somehow gained the courage to think about the nature of themselves and the world in a more disciplined way.  Without preconception, they tried to look at the physical evidence and draw rational conclusions from it.  These men were Nicolaus Copernicus and Andreas Vesalius.  Their books, respectively, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres and On the Fabric of the Human Body, kicked off the Scientific Revolution.  They were followed by other fearless warriors of truth like Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and Isaac Newton (1642-1727), who all carried forward the torch of empiricism against Christian opposition.  Descartes (1596-1650), the first philosopher since ancient times to not be a theologian, established skepticism as the intellectual starting point, and the scientific method in his Discourse on the Method (1637).

This thought revolution was epochal and continues to be a traumatic psychological event as the successive blast waves from it have shaken the Western Mind to its foundations.  It undermined and challenged everything that had been held true to that point. 



Diderot



The Enlightenment is the name we give to the period in the 18^th century when this change in perspective began to percolate through the non-scientific intellectual community in Europe.  By then science had already displayed far more success at predicting the future than religion ever had, and had begun the relentless process of technological innovation that would enable us to manipulate the physical world to an unprecedented degree, and consequently there arose an eagerness to apply it to every aspect of life, including the social, the moral, and the political.  That was largely Denis Diderot’s (1713-1764) project in his Encyclopedia. 

I’ve been reading about the best minds of the Enlightenment.  The more radical members of this movement, those at the cutting edge (Diderot, Baron d’Holbach, Claude Adrien Helvetius, David Hume, Julien Offray de La Mettrie), drew out the scientific approach to its logical conclusions.  Even though they didn’t have the greatest immediate impact, because they were too far ahead of their time, they are the ones who now seem most akin to us.  Better known figures like Rousseau or Voltaire, who had the bigger initial impact, now seem dated, even antiquated.  The radicals saw human beings as basically hedonistic: pursuing pleasure, avoiding pain.  Dismissing metaphysics, they were empirical and utilitarian, and believed in applying reason to the evidence of their senses.  They were pragmatic materialists, proto-evolutionists.  They viewed mind and body as two aspects of the same entity, and death as the end of consciousness.  They were atheists, even though in their day its open profession was a capital offence.  



Holbach



Patterns of thought are parts of culture that take a long time to percolate through the population.  An idea starts with an individual and slowly spreads.  Given the tremendous intervening success of science, one might have expected that in the 250 years since these intrepid thinkers blazed the trail, the ideas they pioneered would have permeated society and become the dominant way of thinking.  But that hasn’t happened, at least not in the United States, not yet, because against this progressive line of thought a powerful regressive pressure has arisen.  In the Enlightenment these people were excited about the triumphs of science and rushed to apply the scientific method to all aspects of life.  Now it is the reverse.  Many people are shell-shocked and frightened by the pace of technological change and seek to limit the scope of science as much as possible, and pull the wool of antique mythologies and superstitions over their heads.  We might call this the Benightenment, the flight from the light that illumines too much. 

Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds since the time of the philosophes, but opposed to it we have the blowback of fundamentalism, the resentment of its relentless pressure on the solace of the superstitious.  Many people are still having great difficulty making the transition to the new way of thinking, even though the process of waking up from the old way began 463 years ago, because in terms of the grand tides of culture, this is a relatively short time, less than 7 lifetimes.  Most people are still living in a pre-Cartesian, mythological mental world.  Ordinary people accept the boons of science as if they were magically generated, rejecting the materialist worldview that makes them possible.  The most likely to be atheists are the highly educated, who have studied the intellectual history of the past few centuries and, of course, scientists, who have had their whole lives to get used to the idea.  Meanwhile most people (some polls say as many as 90% in the US) still have their heads buried in the sand, their fingers in their ears, and are singing “La la la la la la!” as loudly as they can.  How curious that people can drive cars, fly in planes, talk on phones, watch TV, surf the internet, get their MRIs or CT scans, accept all these fruits of a materialist world view, and yet continue to profess belief in a preposterous, primitive mythology without a shred of evidence to support it.  But it just goes to show how slowly some things change, and how reluctant people are to give up old sources of comfort.



Mettrie



A kindly grandfather running the show, the survival of the ego after death, these are comforts people desperately wish to be true.  But as my mother used to say, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”  Wishing doesn’t make it so and, indeed, our longing for the truth of any proposition ought to make us extra-suspicious of it.  The afterlife is a bill of goods the church has sold to buy worldly power, a power it doesn’t deserve.  This snake oil is not going to cure our mortality.  Science tells us that nothing lasts forever.  Stars (including our own sun), galaxies, even the universe itself all have finite life spans, are all mortal.  Chances are our little bodily egos are no exception.  Isn’t it better to accommodate ourselves to the truth, rather than shut our eyes and live in the darkness of a lie?  The sooner we forsake rhis fictitious immortality, the sooner we can fully focus on the practical matter of trying to lengthen our life spans as much as possible.  We're not going back to the dark dream of the Middle Ages, so the regressives' foot-dragging is just wasting time. 

 





 

Econ 101

John Maynard Keynes

When I took my undergraduate degree in Economics (at a very conservative, private, Midwestern college, let it be said), John Maynard Keynes held a place in the economic canon comparable to the place held in physics by Einstein. His General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money ruled political policymaking after WWII and provided 3 decades of prosperity until the late 70s, when something called stagflation came along, a period of high unemployment combined with inflation.  This was a situation Keynes had not addressed in his masterwork, so it was decided that he was not perfectly omniscient after all, and therefore must be passé and irrelevant.  We would have to go back to Adam Smith and the perfectly self-correcting free market.  There had always been a group of people who longed to do this, because it is so much more comforting to believe that the economy is self-correcting and you don’t need to do anything at all.  Besides, lurking within the General Theory was the troublesome element of uncertainty, and it was such a relief to do away with that.  Thus was the mantle of economic deity handed to Milton Friedman, who provided an explanation of stagflation.  I can recall having a job interview in the early 90s wherein I was asked how it felt to have the Keynesian economics I learned in school invalidated.  I laughed and replied that tales of Keynes demise were highly exaggerated.   I didn’t get the job. 

In the wake of the global financial meltdown of 2007-09, Bush, Obama, Sarkozy, and Brown abruptly decided that maybe markets weren’t perfectly self-correcting after all, and perhaps we shouldn’t just let events take their natural course and see what happened.  Keynes might still have some shred of relevance.  Tax-relief and spending initiatives were launched to stimulate growth.  They weren’t really adequate (less that 2% of GDP a year for 3 years), but they did pull the economy out of a nosedive.  Yet, much as happened in 1931, these measures led to a panic about deficits that produced calls for debt reduction and austerity.  In 1931 Keynes warned that these spending cuts would turn the economy downward again, and, indeed, the depression deepened.  Yet here we are 80 years later making the same mistake all over again.  A couple of months ago Rick Perry said that “Keynesian theory is now done.”  That’s like Rick Perry announcing the end of General Relativity.  I suspect his knowledge of the one is equivalent to his knowledge of the other.

Keynes mission during the Great Depression was to save capitalism from itself, and it requires his services again.  Events of the past 5 years have demonstrated yet again the accuracy of his models, and discredited free market theories.  One has to suspect that even congressional Republicans see this, and are only determined to block Obama’s attempt at a second stimulus because they see it as in their political interest to insure that the economy is as bad as possible for the 2012 election.  Whether they are doing it out of ignorance, stupidity, or selfish political motives, if they are successful in blocking any stimulus, the United States will be condemned to a decade of stagnation, joblessness, and declining living standards.  And the Republicans will have performed a great service for all those who wish our country ill.   

The Santa Ynez Valley

Solvang

Home from Las Vegas, we grabbed some lunch and then hopped into my 30-year-old Porsche 911 SC and aimed it south on 101.  It’s a pretty dull freeway drive through the agriculture of the Salinas Valley until you get down to Paso Robles, where the scenery starts to get more interesting.  We were headed for the Santa Ynez valley, in Santa Barbara County, made famous by the 2004 movie Sideways.  In the film, Miles and Jack stay at the Day’s Inn in Buellton, but we decided to stay in the heart of Solvang, the Danish capital of America.  It was a strange variety of culture shock walking around this little town in the evening with its steeply peaked copper roofs, timber-frame construction, and windmills, after having had breakfast in Las Vegas.  The population is a mere 5200, so the downtown is only a few square blocks, but there were groups of Japanese tourists on the streets, chattering in their choppy tongue.  There was a Japanese-language remake of the film in 2009, so that may be why, although the remake shifts the location to Napa. 

Firestone Winery

The next day we headed up Alamo Pintado Road through Los Olivos to the Firestone winery.  In the movie Miles and Jack, bored with the tour, sneak into the barrel room with the two women they’ve met, Maya and Stephanie.  We skipped the tour but were both taken with the Sauvignon Blanc, though all the whites we tasted seemed good, so we got a mixed case of 6 bottles of Sauvignon Blanc, 4 of Riesling, and 2 of Gewurztraminer.  Then I drove over to the nearby Fess Parker vineyard.  This is the tasting room where, in the film, Miles, who has just learned that his novel has been definitively rejected, insists on having his glass filled and finally, when the bartender refuses, guzzles the entire dump bucket.  The pictures of Parker in his Davy Crocket outfit took me back to my childhood (they had little wine-cork sized coonskin caps for sale), but we weren’t crazy about the wines. 

Ballard Canyon Road

I had taken the Porsche thinking it would be fun on the back roads, and it was.  On the way back to Solvang I took Ballard Canyon Road and after a section of tight twisty turns at the top, it opened into a wiggly straight where an Audi sedan was dawdling.  I beeped and punched it past him, the flat six howling, and then settled into a thrilling swift flight through the rest of the turns back to town.  The car handled beautifully and the fun of that one road made it worth putting up with the lack of luggage space, which put a cap on how much wine we could buy. 

 

Mosby

After an excellent lunch in town followed by an old-fashioned ice cream soda at a vintage fountain, we set out for a couple of southern wineries. Some friends had been to this region a few months before and had brought us a fine bottle of Pinot Noir from Sanford, so we were looking forward to visiting there. Unfortunately they had an event underway and consequently it was so crowded we could barely find room at the bar. And maybe my tongue had gotten frazzled by the chocolate soda, or the vintage we tasted was different, but the Pinot Noir just didn’t seem as delicious as the one they had brought us. To be honest, I don’t know how professional wine tasters do it. The same wine can taste quite different to me on different occasions. So without buying anything there, we cruised back down the road to a winery called Mosby that favored Italian varietals. Frieda, after all, is partial to all things Italian. And so of course she did find a few bottles of red to buy there, as well as a raspberry dessert wine. If you go, be sure to check out the psychedelic restroom, which has a continual light show going on inside.

 

I think this area is a nice getaway if you live in L.A., but I prefer the Napa, or the Sonoma valley.  Both the wineries and the wine are better there, and for us it’s half the distance.  So, while I’m glad we checked this area out, I don’t think we’ll be going back anytime soon.    

Pretty Vegas

I first visited Las Vegas in March of 1999.  My mother was house sitting for a wealthy friend of hers on the north side in a neighborhood of mansions with 5-car garages, broad, freshly paved streets, and immaculate shopping centers.  I drove around with her looking at condos in retirement villages and we saw some nice ones with pools, gardens, and views, where seniors putted around happily in golf carts.  They were bargains by California standards, and Vegas seemed like a sun-drenched, antiseptic town, built just for retirees. 

One day I went down to The Strip to see what it was like.  Mandalay Bay had just opened and was all glittery and fresh.  I explored it, even played a few slots, but found them more boring than solitaire, and losing money didn’t make them any more interesting.  The other people playing all looked like they’d wandered in from a trailer park or a truck stop and had a vacant look in their eyes.  I walked down to Bellagio, watched the fountain a little bit, and went in there as well as Caesar’s.  The Strip struck me as an exercise in bad taste with an unlimited budget, a place of non-stop sensory overload, a flashy racket, tacky, tawdry, trashy, sleazy, and skanky (especially in the daylight).  It was the polar opposite of my mother’s neighborhood, but I didn’t much like either of them.

Despite shopping, my mother never got a pied-a-terre in Vegas but Frieda was curious about the place so in June of 2004 we stopped there on the way back to California from visiting my mother in the Midwest.  We stayed at the Luxor because she liked the faux-Egyptian décor.   Neither of us found gambling entertaining, so we just wandered around looking.  Kind of on an impulse we got married, just because we’d been thinking about doing it and they made it so easy there.  Afterward we went to a Star Trek convention, had our pictures taken with a Klingon and a Borg, and took a ride in a shuttlecraft, which was kind of fun, but I still wasn’t sold on the place. 

On our most recent visit, after I drove the Ferrari, we hit a vintage car show at the Imperial Palace (fittingly full of Chinese people) and later had dinner at Casa di Amore, an old-Vegas style restaurant off The Strip on Tropicana.  It was kitschy but it’s the kind of place that doesn’t exist anywhere else, and while listening to George Bugatti play electric piano and sing old standards of the 40s and 50s, I began to get a grip on the unique character of Vegas.  Yeah sure, it’s gaudy and loud and vulgar, but that’s just who it is. 

We stayed at the Luxor again this time and they had a show there called “Bodies,” skinned, plasticized corpses posed in athletic positions, and we were curious about it but didn’t have time to fit it into our 24-hour stay.  As we were on our way back to our room after dinner we passed the in-house nightclub, The Cat House, and I wanted to check it out, but was just too tired.  I don’t even know what goes on in there, whether it’s pole dancing, stripping, burlesque, or what, but I’m pretty sure it’s a different kind of place than we could visit at home, so next time we’re in Vegas we’ll have to give it a try.  Because having new experiences is what Vegas is about.  So I guess what I’m saying is, even though it’s a paragon of bad taste and gambling is stupid, nevertheless Vegas may be starting to win me over because, in spite of these things, there’s always something new to see or do there, and every time I go I manage to have some new kind of fun.  Not to mention that cheap flight and hotel packages are plentiful.  And if all else fails, I can always drive another Ferrari. 

Ferrari to Go

I have long been fascinated by the mystique of Ferrari and dreamed of one day driving one.  Many months ago I saw a local ad for a 308 GTS, a nearly 30 year-old car that was theoretically attainable, but not in any actual, practical sense.  It’s not just the purchase price, there’s the insurance, the maintenance, and where the hell would I put it?  But I could go look at it and, in the course of that, take a test drive.  At least then I could get behind the wheel and feel what it was like to pilot one of these glamorous machines.  But perhaps there were others with the same dream; the dealer would be on his guard against such schemers’ shenanigans.  And, thinking about this, I realized I wasn’t comfortable with the charade.  So I sighed to Frieda: “Guess I’ll never get to drive a Ferrari.” 

           

Many months later, with my birthday approaching, Frieda announced that we were taking a trip to Las Vegas to celebrate.  She had already booked the flight, hotel, and tickets to a show.  Seeing as how neither of us finds gambling entertaining, I was a bit surprised at this.  It must be one hell of a show to justify a flight to the capitol of kitsch.  At first she was coy about the nature of the show, but after much badgering, she offered that it was The Blue Man Group.  Now this seemed highly unlikely to me, as I knew I had no interest in seeing The Blue Man Group and I was pretty certain she didn’t either.  When she added that she had arranged for the Group to take me on stage, paint my face blue, and sing “Happy Birthday” to me, it became totally preposterous.  But then why go to Vegas?  I remembered that, when we were in Paris in 2008, we’d walked by the Moulin Rouge in Montmartre, and later, after we’d come home, I’d remarked that we should have gone to a show there.  So perhaps she had found something similar in Vegas, I thought, and that’s where she was taking me. 

           

At the airport, as we were waiting to board, sensing my disgruntlement at having had to get up at 5:30 AM to fly someplace I wasn’t thrilled about going, she finally spilled the beans.  She’d made a reservation for me at noon that very day with an outfit called Exotics Racing at Las Vegas Motor Speedway to drive a Ferrari F430 on the track.  Well, needless to say, this put an entirely different complexion on things. 



F430



So we picked up a rental car at the airport and headed up I-15 north to the Speedway, which turned out to be a complex so large that the drag races they were holding in one part could not even be heard from the area where I was going, a large garage in the infield filled with exotic machinery, mostly Ferraris and Lamborghinis, but also an Aston Martin, an Audi R8, a Porsche 997 and GT3, and a Nissan GTR.  In Ferraris, besides the F430 I was scheduled to drive, there was a 430 Scuderia, which is the stripped down, souped up, racing version of the 430, and a 458 Italia, the replacement for the 430, which ceased production in 2009.  In Lamborghinis they had the Gallardo LP560, the Superleggera LP570, and the Murcielago LP640.  They were fantastic looking cars, but for me they don’t have the charisma of the Ferraris, which have a long, distinguished, thoroughbred racing history.  After looking over all the cars, I sat in the 430 I would drive, and the Scuderia, just to try them on for size.  The standard 430 was, not surprisingly, the more comfortable.  My reveries were interrupted by a call to a drivers’ meeting where they went over safety issues and the rules with the 35 or 40 people who were there to realize their fantasies.  Then they piled us 3 at a time into Porsche Cayennes for a couple discovery laps, just to get to know the track a little.  It was a 1.1 mile road course inside the 1.5 mile oval with an 1100 foot front straightaway leading into a 90 degree left hand corner followed by 10 more turns, including a switchback and a long sweeper, all making for a complicated line. 



F430



Almost immediately after I emerged from the Cayenne the professional driver who would ride with me as my instructor walked up, handed me a helmet, and ushered me over to the red 430.  He got me comfortably situated amidst all the leather behind the wheel and then slid into the passenger seat.  I pushed the engine start button and the 4.3 liter V8 came to life, throbbing right behind my back.  I tapped the right paddle shifter to put the car in 1^st and eased out of the garage.  In the paddock I went to 2^nd gear and we cruised onto the pit lane alongside the track.  There were other cars on the track so my instructor waited for an opening and then told me to gun it.  I veered left onto the track and stomped the throttle to the floor.  490 horsepower mashed me back in the seat and we took off like a rocket, accompanied by that unmistakable scream unique to Ferraris.  When the tach hit 6500 rpm my instructor told me to shift, so I popped it into 3^rd.  I had never felt this kind of acceleration before.  In a flash (at about 100 mph) I went by the double cones set out to mark the start of braking for the left hand turn that was rushing toward me.  I got off the gas, tapped the left downshift paddle and hit the brakes hard.  I was going so fast I didn’t know if I could make the corner, but the brakes hauled me down with astonishing quickness.  The car went around the corner like it was on rails, without the slightest slide or twitch.  I was awed.  It was a car with unbelievable capabilities of acceleration, braking, and handling. 



F430



My instructor talked me through the course, pointing out the proper line through all the corners, which enabled me to go much faster than I could have had I had to discover the ideal line on my own.  A couple of times other drivers overtook me, and then my instructor would tell me to slow down, pull the wheel over to the side, flip on the emergency flashers, and let the other car go by.  A couple of times I overtook other cars and when I saw the flashers come on I would punch it past them, thrilling to that distinctive Ferrari scream ricocheting off the side of their car as I sped by.  The 430 had active stability control so it was pretty hard to get yourself into real trouble.  A couple of times, just to test it, I went off line and gave the wheel a little twitch, just to see if I could break it loose, and it would, but only for a split second and then it would glue itself to the track again. 

            The package Frieda had gotten me included 5 laps, and I’d added a couple more at $50 a pop.  Needless to say, they went by quickly.  A lap, I think, took less than a minute.  All the same, I was ready to come in after 7.  It was a blast, but it required intense concentration, and mine was starting to flag.  Also, I was feeling pretty jittery by then from all the adrenalin.  Afterward, watching from the sidelines, I marveled at how slowly the cars appeared to be making their way around the track, compared to how fast it had seemed when I was behind the wheel.  Driving a Ferrari on a track like this is obviously so much better than taking a tame, inhibited test drive on city streets.  On city streets you couldn’t even begin to explore the car’s capabilities.  Here you could really drive the car as it was meant to be driven, as hard and fast as you had the skill and nerve to drive it.  And the best part was it didn’t belong to you, so you didn’t have to worry about dinging a fender or throwing a rod.  If something like that happened, it wasn’t your problem, and that made the whole experience an unadulterated joy.  I can still feel the shiver of blasting down the front straight, the Ferrari singing in my ears.  So next time I get to Vegas I’m going for the 2-car package: 5 laps in the Scuderia and 5 more in the 458 Italia. 

Go, Go, Go, Little Queenie

Frieda has been on a Queen binge ever since we saw a 2 hour documentary on BIO, so I’ve got a load of their songs rattling around in my head.  I never know which one is going to be playing on my mental jukebox when I wake up in the morning, because their catalog is so deep.  Since seeing the BIO version, she picked up the original uncut BBC DVD, called Queen: Days of Our Lives, which is far superior to BIO’s edited, censored rendering.  It really gives you a sense of the trajectory of their career and the internal dynamics of the band.  We also rented a DVD of their 1986 concert at Wembley Stadium in London.  With 90,000 seats, this is the second largest stadium in Europe, and that’s not counting the floor, which was packed for this concert.  Playing for hundreds of thousands in big stadiums like this was a Queen specialty, and they were very good at engaging and involving the crowd.  I’ve been known to get bored in concert films, but not this one.  They put on one hell of a fun show.  As a vocalist, Freddie had a range and power that most rock singers can only dream of, and Brian May was a virtuoso on guitar.

This year is the 40^th anniversary of the formation of Queen, which occurred in London in 1971 when Freddie Mercury took over a group called Smile that already had Brian May (guitar) and Roger Taylor (drums) in it, recruited John Deacon (bass), and began to apply his genius toward making the band a legend and the vehicle of his immortality.  They recorded two eponymous albums in 1973 and hit the big time the following year with the album Sheer Heart Attack, containing the single Killer Queen.  Bohemian Rhapsody, a mash up of 3 different song ideas that everyone told them would never get air play, came out in ‘75, hit #1 in the UK and the top ten in the US.  With Crazy Little Thing Called Love (’79) they got their first #1 hit in the US.  Another One Bites the Dust (’80) repeated that feat, but subsequently their success here waned.  They were never as popular in the States as in the UK, Europe, Japan, and South America (except, perhaps, now).  Many of their UK hits did not chart at all in the US.  Their hedonistic, polymorphous perverse message may have ruffled the native American Puritanism.  The infamous review in Rolling Stone (“Queen hasn’t the imagination…to play rock & roll.”) of their album Jazz (’78), now considered by their archivist to have been their best album, illustrates the lack of respect for the band in America.  At the time, American rock critics were focused on the machismo of the punk movement, and thought Queen smacked of the dreaded effeminate disco.  To be honest, I too was, at the time, focused on punk and post-punk bands like the B-52s and Talking Heads, and considered Queen to be a passé glam-rock outfit left over from the early 70s. 

But a curious thing happened on the way into the 3^rd millennium, and now Freddie seems to be having the last laugh, posthumously, because those other bands, which in their day seemed to so much better express the zeitgeist, have remained stuck in the era they embodied, whereas Queen has floated free and become timeless.  In retrospect, you have to admire their courage in pursuing their own complex, eclectic, and virtuosic vision and resisting the pressure to follow the herd.  You can bet that had I been putting together a top ten of rock bands in 1980, or in 1990, Queen wouldn’t have been on it.  But now, having the benefit of hindsight, I would put them in the top five.  Their influence on subsequent artists has been pervasive.  The clearest and most prominent example among current bands is Muse, which sometimes sounds like an outright imitator, but there are plenty of others, including many American groups. 

The other day Frieda was at the grocery check-out and Tie Your Mother Down came on the sound system.  She leaned her head back, closed her eyes for a moment, and listened to the opening guitar line, then snapped her eyes open and said: “I love Queen!”

The girl behind the counter, who barely had been born when Freddie Mercury died, smiled broadly and said, with fervor, “So do I!” 

It looks like Freddie has a great future ahead of him. 

Clear Lake, Iowa

I’ve never lived in Clear Lake, Iowa, but my sister and nephews and their families do.  Most people are probably closer to their families than I have been.  I last saw them 7 years ago, but not in Clear Lake.  I haven’t been to Clear Lake in 30 years.  I’ve kind of avoided the Midwest in general, after fleeing it in my youth.  So I was due, some might say overdue, for a visit.  It turned out to be a trip back in time.  We’re talking heartland Americana here: a big, silver water tower right in the center of town, a band shell in the park right out of The Music Man.  In fact, the creator of The Music Man, Meredith Wilson, was born right next door in Mason City and the 1962 movie premiered there.  And, except for the cars, it could still be 1962 in Clear Lake.  Crime is of little concern.  My sister parked her open convertible downtown, valuables scattered about inside, without a care.  The place feels saturated in old-time innocence.  There are no homeless people, few tattoos, no facial piercings or low-slung, baggy jeans.  The only recreational drug is beer.  There are no people of any color but white.  It must be the America the Tea Partiers are nostalgic for (we avoided the subject of politics).  But for me, it felt like what I knew growing up; it felt familiar, and warm with pleasant memories.  I relaxed on a bench in the park, listened to Dixieland jazz from a Kansas City group playing in the band shell, leaned back, looked up at that looming water tower and felt, in many ways, like I had come home.  It had been a long time, but I was finally back in the culture of agriculture.  And when evening came and the fireflies or, as we used to call them when I was a kid, the “lightening bugs,” came out to frolic on the grass, I almost felt like a kid again. 

My sister and my 2 nephews and their families, who both have homes on the lake, have made a life for themselves centered, during the summer, on sailing.  (During the winter they hatch plans about next summer’s sailing.)  My nephews race their sailboats in a regatta every weekend.   I went out in a power boat and watched the start, and then charged over to the first buoy to watch them tack around it.  At least 2 boats went over in the rather stiff breeze and had to be rescued.  Afterward we all sat on one of their porches overlooking the lake, drank Wisconsin beer, and chatted about the details of the race.  It seemed like a pretty agreeable life they’ve carved out for themselves. 

Clear Lake has a year-round population of about 8,000, and that more than doubles during the summer because it’s a resort and site for summer homes for the well-to-do living between Des Moines and Minneapolis.  Everyone knows everyone (when we walked downtown every other person greeted my sister by name), which is cozy but also means it’s hard to keep any secrets for long because everyone is in everyone else’s business.  Gossip is a mainstay. 

Clear Lake’s claim to fame is the Surf Ballroom which was the last venue played by Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and The Big Bopper in 1959 before they all died in a plane crash trying to get to their next gig.  The night I arrived, Cinderella was playing there.  The Surf has a large sunken dance floor shaped like a skating rink with a stage at one end, rows of booths at the other, and elevated space for tables on the sides.  There are a couple of bars in the rear corners where you can get drinks and snacks.  It’s a nice venue that, when I visited on Saturday, was being set up for a wedding reception.  The walls of the lobby are covered with autographed photos of the performers who have played there; quite a long and illustrious list.  In February the annual Winter Dance Party, the event Buddy had just played before the crash, has become a celebration of his legacy.  I’ve got nothing against Buddy Holly but I don’t think I’ll be visiting in February. 

It’s a kind of comfort and consolation that a facsimile of the world I knew in childhood still exists and I can revisit it whenever I want, but it’s not a place I could live now.  The seclusion of it would be stultifying.  I’m used to an edgier, more variegated environment.  But even more than the culture, there’s the climate.  I just missed a triple-digit heat wave, with humidity to match, and the winters are even more brutal.  Decades of living in a Mediterranean climate have sapped my fortitude for such hardships.  And finally, while the lake (which, incidentally, is not clear) is fine for day sailing, as a presence it can’t begin to compete with the awesome extent and power of the Pacific Ocean. 

 

Donna Leon vs. Serious Lit

I started the first Donna Leon novel in Venice and finished it as the train was pulling into Milan.  Since returning from Italy I’ve read 5 more (she has published 20 so far and Frieda owns all of them so they’re available at no cost to me).  Her novels differ from the standard crime novel fare in that the protagonist, Guido Brunetti, is not your classic alcoholic, melancholy, womanizing loner, but a sober family man who enjoys good food, reads classic Roman literature in the original Latin, is honest, principled, fair, and capable, and has a wife and 2 teenage kids he loves dearly.  And despite his profession as a Commissario of police in Venice, rather than being hard-bitten and cynical, he is, at least early in the series, slightly naïve.  In the 4^th book (Death and Judgment) he underestimates the extent of the political corruption above him, including his own boss who, like many high-level bureaucrats, is only really concerned with protecting his own position and is utterly devoid of courage, ideals, or integrity. Indeed, the noir element in Leon’s books lies in the venality and rottenness of the Italian political order and the people that compose it, which may be why she has resisted having her books translated into Italian.  In the 2^nd book (Death in a Strange Country) this corruption extends to the USAF, whose senior officers cover up the murder of their underlings by Italian thugs because said underlings were threatening to expose the illegal dumping of toxic waste that was being flown in from German bases (the Germans take their laws more seriously).  Because of this ubiquitous graft, the justice that Brunetti is able to achieve is often flawed and approximate.  Sometimes he simply has to let the high level crooks escape, because they are just too rich, powerful, and well-connected to lay hands on.  Other times he has to try to devise some extralegal punishment for them.  In Leon’s Italy, the rich and powerful are, to a substantial degree, above the law.  They quash investigations, buy people off, or pay to have them eliminated.  But, stoically, Brunetti soldiers on, doing the best he can to make things right, and accepting the limits of his own power. 

Despite touching on matters of high culture and delving into stinging social criticism, these books are popular genre novels, not serious literature.  Leon touches on this difference at the end of the 5^th book (Acqua Alta) where she compares an opera singer to a curator of antique Chinese ceramics, saying the first can be appreciated by anyone whereas the second may be judged only by experts, and thus is held to a higher standard.  In literature, we tend to think of this distinction as escapism versus work that attempts to say something significant about life as we experience it.  John Banville is a serious writer who also produces escapist fare (crime novels) under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.  He calls it the difference between art and craft.  Of course, this distinction isn’t clear cut.  There is serious social commentary in Leon’s books (political miscreancy, environmental depredation, human trafficking, priestly child molestation, corruption in the church, etc.), and observations on how we live.  But in serious lit the focus tends to be not so much on plot or characters as on sentences, the writing itself, and, ultimately, on the big picture, the meaning (or meaninglessness) of everything.  In the last half century, really going back to Proust, serious lit has been enamored of the long and winding sentence.  David Foster Wallace is an American example, writing protracted sentences filled with parenthetical asides and footnotes.  The Hungarian writer Lázló Krasznahorkai has taken this to perhaps the ultimate extreme, composing sentences that may comprise entire chapters and feel potentially endless.   

Escapist fare tends to be more immediately enjoyable, because it’s easier to read and hooks you with a story line and characters you love or hate, but it can leave you feeling a bit empty in the long run.  Serious lit tends to be difficult, both to write and to read.  One sometimes gets the impression, in fact, that difficulty, even opacity, is an end in itself.  We have a deeply ingrained belief that hard work is virtuous.  Therefore, if a work is difficult, it must be worthwhile, because we feel virtuous undertaking the hard work of reading it (and reading it demonstrates our elite status and worthiness).  Likewise, if it can’t be easily understood, then it must be profound.  John Banville says that as Benjamin Black he can write 2500 words a day, whereas as John Banville he can only write 200 words a day.  This is because it’s a strain to get everything, the meaning, the sounds, the rhythms, every word exactly right.  In Banville, the payoff is the beauty of the language itself.  In Krasznahorkai it’s the fevered, hallucinatory quality of the prose, which writhes and twists in on itself in an unsettling way.  Though initially interesting, in the long run this becomes soporific, because it’s just too tiring to maintain this level of concentration for so long, and it goes against the tide of our increasing ADD.  Indeed, if our capacity for concentration continues to deteriorate as it has been doing, in 20-30 years no one will be reading this kind of literature because no one will have an attention span long enough to comprehend one of these sentences.  And yet despite its labyrinthine quality one may still detect in Krasznahorkai’s prose a nostalgia for communism, or for some great ism that would promise to remake society in a dramatic, epic way; an idealism that longs for purity, nobility, transcendence, and almost hankers for martyrdom, or at least for a cause that would justify martyrdom.  And maybe, every once in a while, that sort of earnestness and intensity is a refreshing tonic in our shallow and venal world, but a little of it goes a long way, at least in my non-expert opinion. 

So here’s the thing: if we cannot really crack the conundrum of mortality, and are not inclined to martyrdom, does the torment of serious lit, its endless, obsessive, circular brooding, despite its occasional appeal, its flashes of beauty, really offer us something substantially meatier and more satisfying than the distraction of escapist fare?  Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad there are writers like Banville, Wallace, Krasznahorkai, Claude Simon, Thomas Bernhard, José Saramago, W. G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño, and others who push the literary envelope, but if it’s okay with you, for now I’d rather just wander the beautiful byways of Venice in the company of my friend Guido Brunetti.    

Milan

The Duomo from the subway exit

Previously, the only part of Milan we had seen was the inside of the train station, which is cavernous.  The outside, it turns out, is monumental and grand in an eclectic way.  (At night the roof is lit with lavender light which gives it an otherworldly air, as if UFOs were landing.)  You exit onto a spacious plaza which, when we arrived, around 10 in the morning, was full of clothes and shoes venders set up in a warren of booths.  Milan is the business capital of Italy and right away you could see the dedication to commerce.  We had intentionally booked a hotel near the station because we wanted to catch a bus to the airport in the morning.  Beyond the plaza, the area around the station was open and far less congested than I’d anticipated.  We had no trouble finding our hotel and, dropping our luggage in the room, dove into the Metro.  The Piazza Duomo, the heart of the old city, was only 4 stops away.  We emerged from the subway and there it was facing us from across the piazza.  Now, although Europe is full of them, I’m not one to seek out churches wherever I go, but this one is impressive.  It took 5 centuries to build, and you can tell.  The care and attention that went into every facet is phenomenal.  We toured the interior with its soaring vault, plethora of carved wood, and sprays of stained glass everywhere, and then circumnavigated the exterior, literally dripping with sculptures, and it was awesome inside and out.



Entrance to the Galleria



Then we noticed we were hungry.  It was about 1 in the afternoon.  Because it was tourist central, I knew everything around the area would be expensive and mediocre, but we didn’t have time to go elsewhere, and we didn’t know where else to go anyway, so we grabbed a table right there on the piazza and ordered beers and pizza.  In Italy, pizza is usually safe; most places can manage an edible one.  And at least the people-watching was good.  Italian women (and men as well) have a well-developed sense of style and here more than anywhere it’s in evidence.  Milan is the fortress of fashion, the shrine of style.  Refilled and ready, we plunged into the Galleria, a sort of cathedral of shopping with a soaring glass ceiling.  Walking straight through to the opposite end we emerged on a little square with La Scala, the famous opera house, on one side.  From the outside it’s so understated that if you weren’t looking for it, you’d walk right by without noticing.  Passing it, we strolled along Via Dante toward the Sforza Castle, a building with a louring, forbidding air, softened by a big splashing fountain out front.  I had thought that Via Dante, a wide shopping street, would have all the designer shops, but it didn’t, it had just ordinary shops, and a few cafes.  On the way back from the Castle, we stopped at one for an espresso, and then headed over to Via Montenapolitano, where all the designer shops actually are.  Armani, Ferragamo, Yves Saint Laurent, Versace, Dior, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Karl Lagerfeld, Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta, Roberto Cavalli, Chanel, Missoni, you name it, they all seemed to be there, and the prices were breathtaking.  Are there really that many people who spend $800 on a pair of shoes, you ask.  Well, there were some window shoppers like us but, aside from a passenger in a Bentley attended by a chauffeur, I didn’t see anyone actually entering the shops. 



Galleria interior



I have to admit to some ambivalence about the fashion world.  There is an air about it of superficiality and faddishness combined with pretense that is off-putting.  In addition, my social conscience wants to say that anyone who can afford $800 for a pair of shoes probably ought to be paying more taxes.  On the other hand, maybe that’s too severe.  To the extent that a designer is not promoting a follow-the-fad mentality but instead is enlarging the options and possibilities for self-expression, isn’t he making the world a more interesting place?  People who pay these prices are simply exercising another form of patronage.  They’re buying wearable art.  Still, it seems a frivolous, ephemeral art.  Fashion is a form of flirtation, the plumage of the mating dance.  For that reason it’s a youthful art form, but one few youths have the resources to indulge, except in a self-created way.  Wearing designer duds is a status display, a way of showing off your financial worthiness, but also a game of follow the leader.        



Sforza Castle from Via Dante



I knew we were unlikely to find a good restaurant in the neighborhood near the train station, but I also knew it was unlikely we’d find one around the Duomo, and the latter area promised to be more expensive without offering any improvement in quality, so we returned to the hotel and asked the desk clerk what he could recommend.  He offered a place called Il Tavolino.  We found it easily, but the entire staff of the restaurant was Chinese.  Could we trust a Chinese cook to prepare good Italian food?  It seemed unlikely, to me.  My misgivings gathered steam when I scanned the English menu and found items like “horseflesh” and “cakies in the undercarriage.”  Looking around, it seemed to me that the other clientele looked a bit weird, as well.  I was about to make a break for it, but Frieda convinced me it would be alright, so we ordered some swordfish and hoped for the best.  It was edible, and I didn’t get food poisoning, but I wouldn’t recommend the place. 

You can’t develop an intimate acquaintance with a city in 24 hours, but Milan has a different ambiance than other cities in Italy.  It feels more like an American city in that everyone is focused on business; they’re all in a hurry, on a mission.  And it’s like a German city in that it’s cleaner, and more car friendly.  Yet it also has elegant buildings such as you don’t find in either Germany or the States.  So, it’s an amalgam of qualities.  First and foremost it’s a working city, not a resort or a museum, though it has buildings worth looking at.  Frieda, being a New Yorker, liked it very much, but I missed the more relaxed pace of other Italian cities.  Also, while I’m sure there must be good restaurants if you know where to find them, the food we got was mediocre at best, and that’s a travesty, because Italy is all about the food. 

Lake Como

Varenna Lakefront

Lake Como is the best known of 3 roughly parallel glacial lakes in the Italian Alps northwest of Milan.  It’s been a retreat for the wealthy since Roman times and many plutocrats have, over the centuries, built villas there.  Despite its mountainous location, which provides some spectacular scenery, the climate is Mediterranean, so tropical plants can thrive.  In shape, Como is long and skinny.  Viewed from above, it looks something like a running stick man, with Bellagio in the crotch, Menaggio on the west hip, and Varenna on the east hip.  It was our first visit to Como and the Italian Lakes, so we chose Varenna as our base on Rick Steves’ recommendation.  I don’t always agree with Steves, but I find his guide books generally more useful than those of his competitors.  Because these mid-lake towns are only 15 minutes apart by ferry, and, as in Venice, the ferries run constantly (there are both passenger-only and car/passenger ferries), it’s like they’re all part of a single city.  Varenna is the smallest, so it’s a good place to start. 



Stairs in Varenna



We got there in mid-afternoon and had explored most of the town by dinnertime.  Because of the steep terrain, exploring any of these lake towns entails a lot of stair climbing, and in Varenna the stairs are particularly steep.  I had to wonder how elderly people could manage, because, in addition to being steep, the steps were of uneven height and pitch.  (Our hotel was on the main pedestrian route through town, about 3 flights up from the lakefront, and our room was a 3^rd floor walkup, albeit with a terrace and a great view.)  In addition, many of the walkways were paved with river stones, which played havoc with Frieda’s heels, and not only hers, since Italian women, unlike Americans, rarely wear sneakers.  She consoled herself by buying a dress.  Then we found a lakefront café to sit in, have a couple beers, appreciate the view, and people-watch.  Varenna was quiet, serene, and undeniably charming.  It reminded Frieda a little of Vernazza, in the Cinque Terra, but ritzier.  However, we were still missing Venice and, to me, Varenna seemed too small for a long stay.  We supped at the restaurant attached to our hotel, on a terrace facing the lake, which started out delightful but by the time we reached the end of our delicious and leisurely meal, it had gotten dark and, despite the romantic view of the lights of Menaggio across the lake, had turned uncomfortably cold. 



Bellagio



The morning was cool and overcast, threatening rain.  There’s a steel walkway (passerella) attached to the cliff face that leads from the lakefront to the ferry (traghetto) landing. We bought day passes there and headed to Bellagio, sitting in the open part of the boat so our view would be unobstructed.  We quickly discovered there was a cold wind out on the lake, but we braved it in order to see Bellagio from the water.  Bellagio is larger than Varenna and more pretentious; somewhat reminiscent of Portofino on the Italian Riviera.  It also has a lot of stairs, but the flights are wider and gentler in slope and the pavement is a little more even.  There are only a few narrow routes for cars to get through town and the ones that try are unappreciated by the window-shopping pedestrians who get out of the way slowly and reluctantly.  After a couple hours of exploration and an espresso, we got back on the boat and went to the next stop, Tremezzo, a more humble town on the opposite shore.  Here we found a quiet little trattoria and got some lunch: pizza Siciliana and pasta with gambiere (shrimp), both quite good.  By the time we emerged from lunch, the weather was improving, so we walked to the nearby Villa Carlotta, built in 1690, and took the tour.  The layout of the villa struck me as quite unimaginative, with identical rooms arranged symmetrically, but there were some Canova sculptures on display, the best being Amor and Psyche.  Also, the gardens were pleasant.  Frieda particularly liked a walkway along the front of the villa formed by parallel rows of orange and lemon trees tied to a trellis, but again, the pebble paths were a trial in her heels.  Next we went to Menaggio, where we had heard one could catch a bus to the Swiss city of Lugano, on the lake of the same name. 



Chess Players in Lugano



In the morning we set off early for Lugano.  Because it was ready to leave when we got to the landing, we took the car ferry.  Over time I grew fond of the ferries with their promise of freedom and adventure.  The car ferries cut a particularly enchanting figure from our balcony as they plied the lake, shuttling cars and people hither and thither.  It was cold and foggy on the lake, again threatening rain, but in Menaggio, as we found our way to the bus stop, it warmed, and as the bus wound along the narrow Italian roads I even got too warm, but couldn’t wrestle the window open.  Then, around a blind corner, we came face-to-face with an RV (“caravan” in Europe).  The driver slammed on the brakes and both Frieda and I slid off the seat, which had an open space in front of it, and landed on the floor.  Amidst a barrage of expletives and hand gestures, the driver put the bus in reverse and backed up to let the obstacle pass.  I moved to a seat that had a functional seat belt.  After nearly an hour to travel about 12 miles, we were dropped at the edge of a car park.  From the size of the buildings it was clear that Lugano was a real city, not an overgrown boutique like Varenna or Bellagio.  We walked along a rushing, rocky river toward the lake shore, near which we found a pedestrian bridge that led across the stream to a park with elaborate, lovely flower gardens.  You could feel the cultural shift from chaotic, expressive Italy to orderly, buttoned-down Switzerland.  A couple of men were playing chess with knee-high pieces as we strolled along the water front, the triumph of intellect over the rampant emotion south of the border.  The weather by now was sunny and warm, although not as clear as one might have hoped.  We turned into town and found a restaurant with a covered patio near the square to have a leisurely lunch.  We paid with a credit card so we wouldn’t have to buy any Swiss francs, and then made our way back to the bus stop.  In Varenna, when we returned, we got perhaps the best gelato of the trip at a little place by the waterfront. 



View from Monastero



On our last day we considered taking a ride to Como, all the way down at the southern end of the western leg of the lake, past Clooney’s villa in Laglio, but in the end rejected that idea in favor of staying in Varenna, relaxing (which is what the lakes are all about), and touring the Villa Monastero, which, although less noted, we preferred to the Villa Carlotta.  The more interesting rooms were filled with antique inlaid and carved furniture and there was a vintage bathroom with a sunken tub.  It gave you a more intimate peek into the lives of the financial elite in the 19^th century.  Plus the fabulous gardens stretched on for what seemed like half a kilometer along the lakeshore, with winding pathways, stairs, statues, fountains, lookouts at stunning vistas, and gazebos.  They even had tables set up in the shade of trees near the main estate where you could sit and have refreshments.  It was so serene and relaxing that we stayed for quite a while.  When we finally got back to the Varenna lakefront around 2 o’clock all the cafes were full so we returned to our hotel room and ate sandwiches on our terrace, which had a spectacular view of the lake and the mountains behind.  The air was so balmy that below us teenagers were swimming (despite warnings that the lake wasn't clean enough for it here) and sunbathing on the dock.  I could hear strains of “Hey, Soul Sister” coming from their boom box. 

Car Ferry

In the evening Frieda treated me to dinner at Vecchia Varenna, a romantic ristorante with tables on a deck over the water.  The deck is covered and sheltered on three sides, only the lake side being completely open, which was fortunate because it started sprinkling just as we left our hotel and no sooner were we seated than the skies opened up.  It rained cats and dogs for about 20 minutes, drumming on the canopy roof, dimming the view of the far shore, and refreshing the air, but by the time our main course (trout) arrived it had pretty much stopped.  Despite the rain and the open lake side, it was still comfortable, so we lingered and got a bit drunk before going back to the hotel to pack.       

The next day was sunny again as we made our way to the train station to set off for Milan.