Sometimes nostalgia isn't all that attractive. Sometimes it's a little seedy.
The lights are down. The people who brought alcohol or dope are wasted,
the people who didn't are wondering why this event was called a
"party." The 8 girls on the committee, plus their two boyfriends (well,
one is just a friend who is always around to help) are starting to
clean up the decorations, ashtrays, and empty cups. Couples hold each
other on the dance floor, with no longer any pretense of dancing.
You
thought, you young 'uns, that "Stairway to Heaven" was always the last
song for the last 50 years, because it's from the 70's and has been
the last song your entire lives. But it wasn't. This was the last
song. It sucked then, too.
An English tale, though there are Irish and Scottish versions as well. My wife used to tell this one at school and at library story hour. She told another one about "hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats" while throwing stuffed cats from a bag about the room, based on the book by Wanda Gag. Third-graders absolutely loved that. But this one is a bit more alarming and that frisson of fear - many of the children had cats of their own at home after all - was memorable, and they would ask for it again. Tracy has the knack for the right balance of fear and humor with these.
ONE winter's evening the sexton's wife was sitting by the fireside
with her big black cat, Old Tom, on the other side, both half asleep and
waiting for the master to come home. They waited and they waited, but
still he didn't come, till at last he came rushing in, calling out,
'Who's Tommy Tildrum?' in such a wild way that both his wife and his cat
stared at him to know what was the matter.
'Why, what's the matter?' said his wife, 'and why do you want to know who Tommy Tildrum is?'
'Oh, I've had such an adventure. I was digging away at old Mr
Fordyce's grave when I suppose I must have dropped asleep, and only woke
up by hearing a cat's Miaou.'
'Miaou!' said Old Tom in answer.
'Yes, just like that! So I looked over the edge of the grave, and what do you think I saw?'
'Now, how can I tell?' said the sexton's wife.
'Why, nine black cats all like our friend Tom here, all with a white
spot on their chestesses. And what do you think they were carrying?
Why, a small coffin covered with a black velvet pall, and on the pall
was a small coronet all of gold, and at every third step they took they
cried all together, Miaou -- '
'Miaou!' said Old Tom again.
'Yes, just like that!' said the sexton; 'and as they came nearer and
nearer to me I could see them more distinctly; because their eyes shone
out with a sort of green light. Well, they all came towards me, eight
of them carrying the coffin, and the biggest cat of all walking in front
for all the world like -- but look at our Tom, how he's looking at me.
You'd think he knew all I was saying.'
'Go on, go on,' said his wife; 'never mind Old Tom.'
'Well, as I was a-saying, they came towards me slowly and solemnly, and at every third step crying all together, Miaou --'
'Miaou!' said Old Tom again.
'Yes, just like that, till they came and stood right opposite Mr
Fordyce's grave, where I was, when they all stood still and looked
straight at me. I did feel queer, that I did! But look at Old Tom; he's
looking at me just like they did.'
'Go on, go on,' said his wife; 'never mind Old Tom.'
'Where was I? Oh, they stood still looking at me, when the one that
wasn't carrying the coffin came forward and, staring straight at me,
said to me -- yes, I tell 'ee, said to me, with a squeaky voice,
"Tell Tom Tildrum that Tim Toldrum's dead," and that's why I asked you
if you knew who Tom Tildrum was, for how can I tell Tom Tildrum Tim
Toldrum's dead if I don't know who Tom Tildrum is?'
'Look at Old Tom, look at Old Tom!' screamed his wife.
And well he might look, for Tom was swelling and Tom was staring,
and at last Tom shrieked out, 'What -- old Tom dead! then I'm the King
o' the Cats!' and rushed up the chimney and was nevermore seen.
There’s a scene I love, toward the end of The Lord of the Rings
trilogy, after the adventure is over and ordinary life has begun anew:
Our heroes, Frodo and Sam and Pippin and Merry, are drinking at the
local pub, when Sam spots a girl across the room who he’s admired from
afar all his life. Something flickers across his face, equal parts
desire and determination; this is his moment, his destiny.
But before Sam makes his move, he does one more thing: He throws back his pint.
Originally published October 2008. The last comment is poignant.
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It's not that for-profit enterprises are immune from this sort of nonsense, but get a load of this laudatory newspaper article:
(Deleted's) job entails engaging in community partnerships with leaders of other organizations to determine what might be emerging trends or issues in the community. They try to work together through this process to find solutions to the problems they see.
I imagine a lot of donuts are involved in doing this.
Ann Althouse carried the NYT story on the constant mucking up of the data by the researchers in trials of psychedelics. Too many of them can't keep their hands off the stuff for personal use and become advocates instead of objective researchers.
My first thought was "If this is that important to you, and you think this will be a great boon to all humanity, then why can't you put in the effort to do the studies right? Get people who are completely clean, completely objective, and put them out there to do the objective work. Not the people who say that therapists should be strongly encouraged to have their own psychedelic experiences because it will help them understand their patients better.
Stoners were probably better at writing and playing stoner music when stoned. The Grateful Dead, for example. And maybe jazz musicians as well. Trippers better at writing trippy music, drunks better at writing the various types of alcohol-fueled music. Maybe. I'll accept the premise. But I knew plenty of guys who insisted they were better guitarists stoned, but were demonstrably worse, they just had the subjective impression they were better. So you feel like you understand your patients better...does that mean anything? How did the patients rate that? What were the results?
All very obvious.
But I put the question out to one of my email threads, and long-time friend of the blog Tim McMahan-King (King-McMahan? I never remember) pointed out that the problem with MDMA might be that it works. It does what it says it will, relaxing people's defenses so that they trust their therapist more quickly, suppressing the reticence and fears that nature has selected for for millions of years. What could possibly go wrong there? And there have been abuses, of (his words)
...a woman who had PTSD from sexual assault. She participated in a trial in
Canada, was "healed" and then went on to spend the next several years
speaking at conferences and to the press about how amazing MDMA and
psychedelics are. During this time, she moved in with the therapist who
had conducted her sessions and lived in a polyamorous relationship with
him and his wife. It was only years after she suddenly realized how
unhealthy everything was and that the therapist was taking advantage of
her and had been manipulating her from their very first session. So,
everyone 'trusted' each other and didn't see the danger and so it went
unreported for years and she had been listed as a 'success' story.
I have mostly not opined about psychedelics much myself, but linked to people who know more about the subject and seem smarter than me. Aeon, ACX, and Tim previously. That latest (lattest?) is also interested in what we now call abusables being used by earlier cultures, including in the Bible. Not my topic, but some of you might be interested.
There is a character in Piers Anthony's "Xanth*" series, Grundy the Golem. He was assembled out of inanimate materials but displayed a fair bit of personality. One of the repeating bits in the series was the Good Magician Humphrey, who would answer any question in exchange for a year of service. Grundy came to him and asked "Do I have a soul?" and started his year of service.
Humphrey did better than a yes or no answer. In the end, he told Grundy "Only creatures with souls care about the answer." That sticks to the heart.
My second son was worried, as religious and serious children are, whether he was saved or not. That is the evangelical version of a similar question about going to heaven (or not going to hell), or being among The Elect or The Chosen in other groups. This was about sixth grade, as I recall. All the nice Baptist(ish) teachers quoted various Bible verses to him to reassure him, not getting the basic point that it was other verses in the Bible that were making him nervous.
Someone - my wife perhaps - paraphrased Augustine to him. He knew enough to know that that was a Big Name. WRT to salvation "If you want to be, you probably are." This was the key that turned the lock. It was a Good Magician Humphrey sort of answer, reassuring him at a deeper level both intellectually and emotionally.
I wish I could do that. There are people who know how to give the perfect present, or pay the most satisfying compliment, and I envy them.
*Good characters, too many puns and obvious jokes, interesting plot ideas, only partly recommended. I stopped at Book VI, I think there were a dozen.
One of the debates in linguistics is whether there is a grammar embedded in us genetically. One side claims that the marvelously versatile and plastic human brain learns words and speech because that is what the infant is presented with. The brain would adjust itself to some other form of communication equally well - there is little or no brain structure which must be used for language. It happens to be used for language because that is the raw material presented to baby.
The other side, following Chomsky, holds that there are brain structures which are pre-installed for language. The terms Deep Structure,Universal Grammar and Transformational Grammar are used in this context, if you want to go look up the subject more thoroughly. I will note in passing that Deep Structure enjoyed a faddish fame in the 70's (and maybe later, though I wasn't paying attention then), supposedly referring to mythic profundities that underlay music, art, and theater. All the Jungians were very into this, and the Joseph Campbell people fall into this swamp from time to time as well. Deep Structure is actually only a rather banal technical term in linguistics. Steven Pinker calls it a "useful gadget."
The evidence for the Chomskyite view has accumulated over the years, and the current dominant belief is that specific language structures are in the genes. However, the fact that AI seems to be developing grammar based solely on inputs is mucking that up these days. Reply hazy, ask again later, I say. Linguists are fond of ingenious experiment design to tease out ambiguous evidence, but you can do one experiment in your own head. Contrary to the postmodern view that our expectations hugely affect what we hear, we actually do a lot of hearing, in the sense of the brain dividing long chains of sound up into words, before our expectations get their grubby little hands on meaning. It is true that our expectations have some effect on interpretation, especially at the margins, but these are so far downstream as to be of minor importance.
Human speech has few clear breaks between words. Fluent speakers, especially in informal conversation, run everything together. If you have briefly studied a language and expect to be able to understand it spoken, you find that you cannot pick out a single word of a sentence - you can't even tell where one word leaves off and another begins. Only after much hearing does your brain begin to predigest the sounds into words for you. Then, armed with a clear few words of each sentence, you can begin to interpret based on gesture and context.
This is why receptive understanding of a language one learned when young lasts much longer than speaking that language. Logically, it should be the other way around: we should be able to take a hundred remembered verbs, a hundred adjectives, and a few hundred nouns and make do even decades later. The thousands of words that other speakers might throw at us should be a much harder list to hold in long term memory. But it is not so. Once trained to a language, the brain breaks up the stream of sound into the correct discrete words, even when it has forgotten what those words mean. (Interestingly, this sometimes takes a period of adjustment, as if the mind is searching for the correct language archives, but once found, switches over quickly.)
Misheard lyrics are your at-home evidence. Because singing is unlike speech in cadence, the brain has trouble finding the breaks. It settles for breaking the stream into any words that are close, then sends it on to another part of the brain to figure out the provisional meaning. That pre-meaning-finding part may find a plausible construction, or may have the memory play it back to the decoder brain for a new division. "Scuse me, while I kiss this guy" splits the s from sky and attaches it to the, making it this. The decoder brain thinks this is fine, because it has found real words to pass on to the pre-meaning-finder. The meaning-finder says "weird, but coherent," and accepts it. Unless we direct even higher parts of the brain to focus attention on the meaning to see if it really makes sense, the provisional meaning lives on in our memory indefinitely.
Note that we do a lot of decoding and storing automatically, completely independent of the meaning of the words. Our expectations of meaning, all our culture and biases have played no part.
Garage bands and psychedelic wannabees did not attempt to sing "Incense and Peppermints" in the 1960's. Why? Because no one could tell what some of the words were. Try it. No peeking. I intentionally did not put up one of the videos that shows the lead singer, as that would provide additional clues that were not present on the radio.
(Ed King, who became the bassist for Lynyrd Skynyrd and wrote "Sweet Home Alabama" is on the far left.)
Even I never got what some of those lines were, and I was a little fanatic about such things. I won't admit to you what I heard then.
When Austin Powers used the song in a movie, he got the words wrong. I have put the incorrect lyrics in italics, with the correct ones in bold. (How do I know which is correct? If you were there in the 60's, you know that "occasions, persuasions" is infinitely more likely than "oh cajun spice, sweats and" You just know. And it's a great example of the brain just making stuff up, sending it along to the memory, and hoping no one will notice that it makes no sense.
Good sense, innocence, cripplin' and kind. mankind Dead kings, many things I can't define. Oh Cajun spice, sweats and blushers your mind. Occasions, persuasions clutter your mind Incense and peppermints, the color of thyme. time
Who cares what games we choose? Little to win, but nothing to lose.
Incense and peppermints, meaningless nouns. Turn on, tune in, turn your eyes around. Look at your soundyourself, look at yourself, Yeah, yeah. Look at yourself, look at yourself, Yeah, yeah, Yeah, yeah.
Tune-a by theTo divide this cockeyed world in two. Throw your pride to one side, It's the least you can do. Beatniks and politics, nothing is new. A yardstick for lunatics, want one of you one point of view.
Who cares what games we choose? Little to win, but nothing to lose.
I consider Niceness one of the most dangerous substitutes for the gospel in our age. Every era has its own difficulties, its own heresies, its own temptations. Garrison Keillor captured it well. When he spoke about the Dark Lutherans, he couldn't help but drag the Happy Lutherans as well. We used to be Lutherans, and Happy Lutherans are where the stereotype of "Minnesota Nice" comes from. Not that the German Catholics or the various Brethren didn't pick it up quickly, but the white-hot center of Niceness is Scandinavian.
We are seeing it on display more than ever recently, this Potemkin Christianity, but I won't try and explain to you why it is an imitation. You likely already sense it, and rereading Mere Christianity, I saw that Lewis had done so far better than I ever could.
Mere Christianity by CS Lewis is available as a PDF in a few places. It depends on what appearance you like. I want you to focus for a bit on one of the last chapters, "Nice People or New Men." Chapter 10 in Book III, "Beyond Personality."
Originally posted in September 2008, when I had about had it with the election. I don't think I saw this as strongly over the last dozen years of my career, but I still thought it essentially true. It may be part of some larger truth of teams dominated by one group with a sprinkling of another, but i never thought that through. Have at it.
*********
I have got to think about something other than politics...
Global statement: It is better to have one sex predominate rather than have near-balance. But it is not good to have one sex exclusively for your cooperative group either.
My job is structured around a team approach. A dozen patients, all in crisis, and we meet for 90 minutes each day to review each of them daily. That's seven minutes each plus interruptions and one-liners, which isn't much if it's your crisis we're dealing with. But those 90 minutes set the course of the rest of my day. Concision and camaraderie are of enormous importance.
There are 5-8 players every day, plus student observers about half the time. Most are regular daily players, but because nursing and rehab works weekends, we have mix-and-match coverage people fairly regularly. I have done this for a long time, and have been on teams that are all or nearly all male, and teams that are nearly all female. When one sex predominates for any length of time I will kiddingly point it out. Boy Team. Girl Team.
The ideal is to have two of one sex and the rest of the other sex. Neither gender does well when it gets the whole culture to itself, and having one female among males or one male among females is usually not enough to change the prevailing culture. Even for a dominant personality like mine, outnumbered is outnumbered, and being on Intense Girl Team for too long gets wearing.
But an equal balance turns out to be worst of both worlds, and no fun at all.
We did an escape room tonight as a family, eight of us. We finished well under the time allotted, but at about twice as much time as the record, which shamed us at first. We learned that the record holders for each room were those who had done "triple digits" of escape rooms before, so we felt less bad after that.
I was perhaps the least helpful there, though I did have my moments of doing puzzles that could have been designed for me, as did a few others who were not as central as we expected but still had moments. The two strengths were my two oldest sons, who got on the same wavelength somehow and carried us through, and the two granddaughters, 16 and 13, who gradually got on the same wavelength as well and helped us finish strongly. I have only done three of these, but I think that is key. You need different strengths, but dyadic strength, pairs who suddenly work together at high levels, look like the road home.
There may be something about team building in that. Groups are fine, but pairs in concert, even if temporary, have a magical power. Though maybe that can move up to triples in a good situation? Tell me.
This is one where I grew increasingly frustrated listening to different versions. I just wanted to hear two voices in harmony singing the song simply, as close to the version I learned at church camp in 1966 and sang with my folkie friends 1970-74.
Our first son went into the hospital at two weeks old in 1979 with Failure To Thrive, and he was hooked up to much equipment and we we only allowed to touch him gingerly. We poured water over his foot to baptise him, as that was what we were allowed to touch. And we sang with our hearts in our throats, softly and deep into the night, the nurses weeping to hear us will him back to life. They would come by and listen, one would join in for a verse when she could, on this song and a few others. Seven years later, a nurse at the hospital I worked at mentioned why she couldn't work pedi and switched to psych instead, telling this story. That was us, I told her. He's fine now and has a younger brother.
Just sing the song. There are so many show-off versions of this one. Just sing the song.
These two fit vaguely into the category of mental health as I clean up the last of 2008. A few more to go before I start reprising 2009.
I used to often point out that the ability to laugh at oneself is a marker of good balanced personality. Then someone was insulting in the comments because of a comment I had made over at Language Log and I was a little snippy in return. Fair, but snippy. I should have laughed at myself instead.
I was surprised when a psychology PhD student who was interning at our hospital openly put forward 9/11 Truther ideas. I gave my usual insight - not to him, but on the blog - that the paranoia precedes the evidence in a conspiracy theory rather than resulting from it.
For the second time I have read someone using the phrase "out of pocket" to mean away, not available, out of reach. It rings oddly. And yes, both would be people younger than I am and reasonably intelligent, so this may be a new use of the term rather than a mistake.
Four of us in the car, not always hearing each other clearly, leaping to conclusions only semi-correct, referring back to previous statements made one minute or ten minutes ago, we did briefly get it sorted out who had meant what, establishing that no one had asked what time it was, but the town we were in was Hopkinton, which should perhaps be included as a town in Central NH (two of us had initially agreed that only Concord should bear that label) along with the other Concord suburbs.
And then we were off again. This is conversation for Wymans, a Venn diagram of individual conversations which are not identical but do intersect. Four worlds. I am trying to work out whether there is any territory shared by all four circles when the number of participants gets that high. My initial opinion is yes, but it is not large.
Snow Treasure can still be found, decades after it was written. It has had multiple covers over its many editions. It was a Scholastic Book Club monthly selection the third month I was in fourth grade. (The first two were The Road to Agra, which the dog chewed, and Mrs Coverlet's Magicians, which I reread many times.
I loved the story, and was disappointed to later find out it was fiction. I swear it was not presented that way when I was a child. Though it may have been based on a true story, which I suppose makes me feel a bit better. I sent a copy to my son in Norway, and his fiancee also read it. She had never heard the story before, but thought it possible.
We were at a bookstore we visit only every couple of years, Old Number Six Book Depot in Henniker, NH. It is one of those well-organised but overcrowded establishments with a proprietor that looks like a Hogwarts shopkeeper. We visit used bookstores mostly when Ben and Jen come up from Texas. Another couple came in while we were there, and as the woman was in the children's section (we were armed with two children's librarians ourselves), we chatted with her.
Tracy: Where are you from?
Woman: Brookline.
AVI: Oh, I just met someone from Brookline on a zoom call week before last, who runs the Inklings presentation group on Fridays. Roy Waller.
Woman: That's my husband.
AVI: Over there?
So I went over to talk to Roy Waller, chuckling to my son who has watched these coincidences occur all his life and is resigned to them by now. I started to explain to Roy, who broke in and said "One degree of separation." "That's right," I said. That's my goal."
Ben also chimed in to recount the time I spent an entire cab ride trying to connect with a cabbie in Budapest, and I reminded him of the limo driver from the Dominican Republic. I live my life this way, and it's very satisfying.
