Redeeming Value

The elections in the States are mostly decided, now, with Patty Murray having locked up Washington and clearing up some of that unsettling picture: we have, as a nation, shifted the balance of (especially financial) power in government to a party which seems to have no platform. I do know what their platform isn't, but a lot of stuff isn't. Like Louis C.K. would advise, "Some things are, and some things are not. Because you can't have 'everything is'--then, nothing wouldn't be. You'd have giant ants in top hats, tap dancing, all sort of crazy shit." And as a result of what we now don't know anything about, I have discovered something.

First, what we do know. Most clearly, we do know that we have elected three new congressmen who are categorically opposed to abortion, and one in particular from Kentucky, who is against it even in the case of the mother's life being compromised. I don't agree with it, not least of all because it's logically inconsistent--if you're for small government and for government charge over women's right to choose, your brain is either non-functioning, or you just don't like women very much, or you're religious, which fervently compels you to both. And speaking of inconsistency--and incompleteness, while we're at it--we know that there is a huge groundswell--a thing whose type I quite like--which has an aim that I very much do not, to the point of being scared of it. This is one of the principle points I am planning to come to in a later post, concerning the Contract from America. One pervasive theme that seems to exist in a lot of the rhetoric I read or see indicates that we, as a nation, are falling away from both deontological ethics and empirically-based utilitarian ethics, and we are starting to embrace a virtue-based system of ethics. By no means is this switch embodied by one part and not by another; nearly everyone with a microphone or under a spotlight seems to be guilty of this, and the only variance is the degree to which those ethics are supportable a priori or, which is more convincing in government, by way of precious evidence. This is deeply concerning to me; virtue ethics are a turret whose gunman does not require training to operate it.

When you embrace the fundamental truth of virtue ethics, that intrinsic and instrumental value are relative and individually determined, you necessarily trust everyone to make his or her own judgements about the common good and about the production of happiness against a rubric that you admit does not exist. In other words, you could equally defend selfishness and charity, and you can do either one as often and as vibrantly as you feel is appropriate. The kickback, and really the only check against being inconsistent or heinous, is that people eventually just stop hanging out with you, if you are horrible. But what if everyone behaves this way? Where is the check? And how can you tell who is more horrible, if that is all you are used to; or you are given a choice between equally vapid, detrimental options; or you are too ignorant to know the difference between horrible and nourishing? If you refuse to outline a cogent and consistent moral outline, as with deontology, then you lose even an attempt at rigidity or predictability. If you refuse utilitarianism, you admit that past evidence is not sufficient to persuade you that some action or attitude or stance is, or can be, more likely to cause happiness in people than another. And, having shrugged off those two structures, you embrace the whirlwind of relativism which has snapped up virtue ethics, and which can drop that system on its head, in a field a thousand miles away from where it was standing seconds earlier. All the systems have their flaws, and I have written a handful of papers on these; but I don't understand why, when the consequences of the decisions made by our politicians routinely govern our air, our bodies, our privacy, and our futures, we would so quickly abandon the idea that predictability is precious. It seems that we would rather vote for who we think a person is, and we want to leave behind what a person does and why a person chooses what he does.

I am confused by almost every politician who exists, because it seems as though they are either bad at thinking, bad at empathizing, or bad at feeling shame. To be worse is to be all three, and therefore to be the vast majority of suited grinners who we would see in newspapers, if we read them enough to know that you are doing us a disservice even by shaking our hands. I am confused by the people who are allowed to vote in our country, because of exit poll data and because of quotes in media. I am confused by priorities inculcated by most adults, in most states of the union, most of the time. I feel as if my future, or at least my satisfaction with it--my sense of confidence--is standing in front of a pillbox, and I am already looking down at my chest, touching the tear in my scorching jacket, knees weak and teetering, breathing smoke.

In the Morning, and Amazing

Here's the counter-intuitive key to winning thumb wars: when you get pinned down, what you have to do is push down, not pull up. You only have a ten count to do it, so listen up. When you push down, you create some cushion between your opponent and the top of your thumb, and you can squeeze out if you slip to the outside. If you pull up, you meet your opponent's strength directly, like trying to get through a wall by sprinting. It doesn't matter if you have way more talent, or you're far stronger, or even if you have beaten this same person a thousand times before: it's not about skill, force, or precedent. If you act like a poor tactician, then you are. You pull straight up, and you might as well waste your time praying. Sometimes thoughts like these get to me when I'm working, but I'm not the one in charge.

So what we did was, we went to Munich last weekend. And it turns out Oktoberfest is pretty fun.

Active

I start my day before the sun does. It's a rare thing for me to be able to say that, which is no surprise to anyone who actually reads this thing. I often say that my three favorite things are sleeping, eating, and napping, and the Austrians certainly make sure I eat well; but as for sleeping, well, my nights are thinner than a butcher's dog. This is a metaphor my headmaster dropped on us in our first week. It's precise.

Sunday is the only off-day that the school provides the students, and it was still as packed as a day of rest can be. Breakfast is at 8, and it was pancakes, and it was fruit and yogurt, and it was hot cocoa, and it was delicious. We then had cakes and coffee at Dallman's, a pastry shop up the road owned by the husband of one of the administrative gurus at the school, a lovely and smiling woman named Natascha. That's how things are in St. Gilgen; everyone is related to everyone, and the fashionable spread of news and secrets very strictly underscores that fact. Then just after noon, we cooked four pizzas the size of Vatican pulpit bibles, and we rode mountain bikes. That is, some of us did: I napped. This is also how St. Gilgen is: we are frenetic in pace, or we are power-switched off. This is the way of the restaurants, of the kids, of the weather coming over the mountains.

The first full week of school is over now, and I finally feel like I can update something worthwhile. This case proved impossible last week for two reasons. First, I knew that I would be way too busy to concentrate on something that calms me down. And second, I figured that most of what I said would have been nonsense, because it would simply change again this week. Both reasons were proved right, but those are no bother now: I have something of a schedule, and even though I'll be ragged come December, I'm glad I finally have a routine. On Mondays and Thursdays, I will take out a team of kids in the quad skiffs that the school reserves, and we'll be doing some rowing around Wolfgangsee. Tuesdays and Saturdays will be football. Wednesdays and Fridays, we have rehearsal for a stage adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes tale, which we will be putting on at the end of the term. Hopefully I'll also be able to shadow the advanced English and Math classes, and the philosophy equivalent in the International Baccalaureate program, which is called Theory of Knowledge. If that sounds packed, then our trips, hikes, mountain bike courses, and team sports visits are peppered into nearly every week of the term. We do, very happily, find ourselves served chocolate mousse or some kind of pastry with every lunch: you just can't complain about compulsory mousse.

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I started my first day of rowing coaching today. It was a delight. For the next year, I will be a member of the rowing club in St. Gilgen, and I will have two sessions a week. On Monday afternoons for four hours, I'm in charge of the juniors. Sixteen girls and one boy, as excitable as house cats, and some of them with equivalent swimming experience. A group of them, however, are remarkably skilled for their young age, and all of them are lovely and excited to learn. Rowing makes you feel like you're in charge, but also reminds you that what you are in charge of is very small and, through the lens of the other agents affecting you, you find that your keep is insignificant: a life lesson which cannot be learned too early, or it makes you tired the rest of your life.

Tomorrow is my day off. I am set to spend it in Salzburg, I think, with another boarding assistant who I am quite fond of, and with whom I get along as well as anyone in presently in Europe. I can't think of what to do yet, even, because my eyes hurt when I blink them and the kids, although this will never happen again, were given an erroneous quantity of sugar right before study period. This had made them unmanageable and dangerous, like gorillas wearing haberdashery. It is decided: tomorrow will be Schloss Leopoldskron, Old Town, the river, and when everyone comes to meet up with us at night, and the river is jetting with the newly lay storm water, it has to be the Augustinerbrau. I'm thankful to be active, finally, but there is just no substitute for the arrival of a very anticipated day off.

The Weight of History

A thing happened to me when I lived in Washington D.C. that made me realize how old I have become. It also happened to be one of those things which, when it happens to you, you get the immediate and undeniable feeling that you'll always remember it so very clearly: the smell in the air around you will seem to hang the same way as it did at that moment, spiced with the scent of salt water taffy and old books.

It was too big to write about; the import of all these wars, their meaning to their participants and their inheritors. You can stare at the memorials and read up on the battles and acts of Congress, the soldiers, with their hawkish eyes. But I will never feel the foundation of a church thundered out by another country's planes. I will never have to care for or carry one of my countrymen, because he cannot walk, his legs stolen by an enemy mortar. We were at the Smithsonian American History Museum.

The war dedication is my favorite full-length exhibit, although it has every reason not to be. I hate the glory of war. Everything seems set to violin music, or to far away drums. When the throaty commentator on an audiobook tells you stories about these too-long wars, about the men who order them and who comprise them, you think of men with more grizzle and composure than you have, or ever will: and it almost must be that way. To at least somebody, a grainy picture is a hero, if he wears fatigues. I don't quite buy into it, but considering even my objection to it's actual practice, the influence of war is impossible to let alone, or even to undermine. As are the outrageous strength shown by some of its principle agents, foreign and domestic. As are, for a thinking man, its elegant, conciliatory alternatives, which I would favor categorically, and which are borne of compassion as much as calm; as much, even, as cowardice. You sit by the atomic bomb layout, and you think about your generation in every country: how many millions must die because of an argument? An impulse? An accident? An idea? How many today, and how many of their sons? How many brave?

The corner of the exhibit that is devoted to military action taken since the first Gulf War, it's hidden past a shadowy foyer with a drinking fountain and a man with two middle school daughters. The guardians of the present, these three whispy middle Americans. The dad is a balding man in his late forties, whose back looks like the part of a walking cane where your hand goes, and with just as much weight pushing down on him. His daughters were quiet, and narrowed their eyes as they found their words floating past them, in the air: ''But, why did they crash the planes like that?'' Old dad's mouth slanted down and touched the cold tile floor, and his forehead crinkled. He scratched an eyebrow, wondering whether or not a way to answer his girls even existed. They have a favorite movie, by now, and they know what they like having on their pizzas. Each girl has a best friend, each has a personality and an email address, a each has taken vitamins and has read Steinbeck. They have slang, pets, formalwear, secrets. Scars. Journals. Heroes. And they were too young to remember September 11 happening.

City Lights

The newest punctuation in my life is a brand new living situation, which is fantastic and enervating in a couple of ways. I used to hate San Francisco, because I figured it was basically a confusing and intensely dirty version of San Jose. I remember feeling uncomfortable about the notion, which seemed to be more true every time I visited The City, that the rules that apply everywhere else are void anywhere on the windy peninsula. It's a strange thing to feel like your instincts are irrelevant. But now I'm comfortable with the feeling, which, as it turns out, is reducible to a much more simple, and somewhat more pleasing maxim: everyone gets to act like an adult, and eclectic is encouraged.

The paramount example of that attitude is located about sixteen man-sized steps from my front door, and is actually much closer than that: the window that opens into my living room exposes the upper hill and playground of Dolores Park, the stoic jewel of the Mission District. Fifteen square blocks of rolling green, freckled with palm trees and a footer of basketball courts, are the most attractive option I have found for any day that needs filling. Everything is relaxed there: the attitude, the pace, the rules, the music that flows from novelty stereos and the tin drums of whoever is paddling away. A woman waddles by our strewn-about blanket, offering tamales. A man visits later, selling pot truffles. Old men with cheeks like the palm of a baseball glove collect recyclables and stuff them into muddy burlap sacks. A whiffleball game has started on the south hill, and a speck of plastic lofts across the 74 degree sky. The world teems here, but calmly, and on its own. Time seems to skirt away fluidly, while we lie under the sun and cars flit down the curvy streets lining the park. The earth bumps underneath our ripped cotton comforter, conversation snapshots dance themselves along the wind, and you can fall asleep before you stop smiling.

A Heartbreaking Work

The decision which was made on May 26th by the California Supreme Court was in every way a concussion to the hope that I have for my future. The decision to uphold Proposition 8, passed in November of last year by a 5% margin, was extremely divisive. I can remember the intense despair that many of my friends and I felt, not because it hampered our ability to marry, but because it spoke so poorly of the tolerance common to the meagerly rational electorate. My view of that degree of hateful discrimination was, as it is ever more, simply this: I cannot bear the thought that so many people who are so bad at thinking are given so much power.

For me, ethical decisions are almost entirely logical processes which, while frequently stressing because of their ability to produce several rationally supported answers, are at the very least justified, arguable on some basis common to opponents, and amenable to scrutiny and revision. I will revisit this point often in this blog entry, in the debates which will inevitably follow it, and indeed throughout my life, owing to the maddening insistence of a worldview that almost any pain is a better option than intellectual numbness. The first part of my criticism stems from the way that people voted on the initial ballot; it is an issue of predictability. Deplorably, the voter data speaks volumes about the way in which lifestyle, not logic, informs the way that people vote.* I thought that in the supreme court, a body whose title trumpets the gravity of its purpose, there must be a tendency to get it right. In other words, I do not have confidence that any random majority will choose the right thing most of the time, but I do hope that a trained and rigorous council of experts will do just that. Today, that sentiment is proved worthless.

Briefly, for those of you who have not had time to read the public content the 6-1 majority decision, or about any of the defenses for either side, here is an unbiased recapitulation of the reason that the appeal was denied. After Proposition 8 was passed, the opponents to the proposition alleged that the vote amounted to a revision, which necessitates that two-thirds of the legislature rule in favor of its ratification. The corollary of this argument is that the law which would be enacted as a result of passing Proposition 8 is not simply an amendment to the state constitution, and therefore not available to the public to decide based on opinion. It is inaccurate, although understandable given the intense frustration prompted by the CASC decision, to suggest that the court ruled that a ban on same-sex marriages is constitutional. In fact, they have done the opposite of this only last year, whereupon over 18,000 same-sex couples were legally married. Rather, the CASC ruled first, in 2008, that marriage should extend to same-sex couples, and has ruled now, in 2009, that the public does indeed have a right to vote that it wants an amendment to the state constitution which would disallow this sort of union. Attorney General Jerry Brown also asserted in his appeal that the proposition would violate a Californian citizen's right to privacy, and that it rescind an inalienable right. The CASC flatly denied both of these appeals, stating simply: "No authority supports the attorney general's claim."

I say categorically that if you have voted in favor of Proposition 8, if you do favor its sentiment, or if you support the efforts of anti-appeal campaigns in that vein, I have an overwhelming and unmatched disdain for your position. There are many opinion-related matters in a wide variety of fields in which I may oppose a certain view in the argument for which I can see some sort of merit. That is to say, it is absolutely the case that I have disagreements with people, but I can almost always see that my opponent has some reasoning. Gay marriage is one instance which is not governed by this general rule of understanding. In my research of the initial proposition and of the recent court decision, I have encountered dozens of criticisms of gay marriage and of the position supporting gay marriage. Every tiny word of it is nonsense, and wholly unsupportable by any mind with the slightest portion of decency, modesty, or honesty. Not only do I firmly revile the desire to ban gay marriage, but I can see absolutely no evidence to support the assertion that is it either ethically supportable or utilitarian. The anti-gay marriage position is small, it is disgusting, and it embarrasses me every last second that it is allowed to be propagated.

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*According to the raw data collected and aggregated by the Sacramento Bee following the poll results, those most keen to vote to restrict the legality of gay marriage were: Republican or conservative (82/85%), black (70%) or Hispanic (53%), Protestant (65%), Catholic (64%), a high school graduate (56%), older than 30 (55% for voters 30-44; 54% for voters 45-64; and 61% for voters 65 and older), gun owners (62%), supportive of the war in Iraq (85%), and supportive of Bush's policies and presidency (86%). According to the same data, those who voted to support the gay right to marriage were: registered Democrats, independents, or liberals (64/54/78%), white or Asian (51%), non-religious (90%), and post-graduate students (60%). Interestingly, 61% of the people who voted YES on Proposition 8 also said that race was a factor for their vote in the Presidential election.

Someone Should Be Studying These Things

I bet that it would make a good book to collect the bizarre stuff that people think about, and to just have someone clean up the grammar and structure a little bit. I should think that it would be rather nice to wake up on a Sunday, say, around 2pm (as is my custom on Sunday mornings, Saturday mornings, and other mornings when the Giants do not play an afternoon game) and to eat a turkey sandwich, lazily thumbing in and out of some guy's pointless thoughts. It must be at least half-interesting to some of you: after all, you're reading this. And it would obviously be better if you had that turkey sandwich.

Spying on Whales
I begin with the premise that for all the advances that we have made in our study of the myriad species on our strange planet, sometimes our technology is too powerful to be useful. On several occasions, I have seen marine biologists on television, zipping their UltraWhite Smile boats through the Pacific. They drop down their scanners and dials, their cone-shaped sonar dishes and their cooing sonic mechanisms, and they start pulsating coded messages to all the whales in proximity. They're talking, and hoping to hear back. I'm not sure what sort of research is being done by these trials. I do not consider myself an expert on whale conversation, but I thought that we knew pretty much all we really needed to about whale habits. They swim up and down the coast depending on the weather, they eat krill, and they have heroic battles with giant squid the size of space shuttles. Case closed, I figured, but damned if you can't find some guy with a patchy beard and a whole bunch of pockets who wants to sail for a living. Onwards with the funding, then, to invent all these fancy gadgets that let us chirp to whales.

The weird part is, they answer back, these lumbering giants with their bathtub faucet heads. A couple flirtatious, mechanical blips, and these whales quip back with as much undersea gossip as the scientists can haul in and--get this--interpret. Because, you may ask, what good is doing the work if you cannot figure out what the things are saying? I have no idea how this sort of translation is done. I suspect, and now with even more evidence, that we have found an aquatic Rosetta Stone, and those swarthy marine biologists are just keeping it a secret. I have suspected this for years, in fact, and I suppose that it is the exact reason that Porter Ricks was able to understand Flipper; how else, after all, are we to believe this was possible? And good, I say. Otherwise, both Coral Key Park and Marine Preserve and mid-1960s television programming would have been all the worse for it.

How strange it is that we spy on whales? It is probably no weirder than the fact that I am into a third paragraph of writing about it. But there are two particular things in this whole matter that stick out to me. First, I cannot think of any other animal, with the obvious exception of other human beings, that spy on one another, across species or within a species. So, it seems to be that we are the only animals that have a system for recording and interpreting the conversations that other animals have with each other and with our own computers. When you think about it, it is probably a good thing that other animals really do not concern themselves with these sort of trivialities. Only the species that has NASCAR commemorative KFC buckets could invest in whale translation as a profession. Second, I am not sure that I can say, with confidence, that I could never imagine myself in the topsiders of that sailor. There are only a few things left that are a total mystery to us, but have the prospect of being comforting anyway. I can imagine being that lonely scientists, floating askance on a choppy emerald ocean, dropping six-hundred foot of steel cable into the deep, and waiting. Maybe you get a booming sigh back, and you have company somewhere under the unimaginable blueness. Talking to whales may be the intersect of a Venn diagram which addresses things that are magical and things that are scientific.

Real Trust
Actually, when you look at how we generally act towards one another, we probably should not trust airline pilots half as much as we do. Here are the facts. I have probably taken 100 plane flights in my life, and likely more than that, the majority of those having come in the past four years. Each time, my routine is the same: I guard against boredom and people with the cunning use of an iPod, I bring with me several books which I never read, I buy a tremendous wealth of candy for the flight, and I board a several-ton flying bus to be guided in a parabola across the planet by a man I will never meet. This man now has the ability to kill me. But I get on the plane, I clickwheel over to Wilco or Belle and Sebastian or Sufjan Stevens, and I rack out with my face pressed against the plexiglass, nary a thought for the 'morrow. There is no other time in life when we are required to trust so much, given so little. Why do we do it, and without paying this relationship any attention? I think it has to be basically the same mindset which governs our collective respect for Zorro.

What I mean to say is, it seems that we can reasonably infer that if someone is wearing a mask, he's either a hero or a madman. The allure of what is not seen--and therefore, what could potentially be--is enough to inspire confidence in a masked avenger, and is likewise sufficient to bolster our terror of a sheathed lunatic. I think the mask somehow convinces us that our initial opinion is right. And if in cinema, then why not in person? We get a great deal of what we imagine life to be like from the print we read or the films we see, so this bit of transposition is not too big of a stretch. Every girl I have ever dated seems to want, from me, some version of John Cusackitude: so this mask idea might as well have some merit. Someone has entrusted a man with the responsibility to fly a jumbo-sized tuna can through the troposphere--he even gets little uniform accessories, if he's good enough--and if he is mostly an unknown to his passengers, that may actually be calming. The pilot even has the benefit of that speaker system, by which he can, through his trademark drone and slogans, reassure everyone in the cabin that he knows what he's doing and that everyone can go ahead and relax. If I knew that Spiderman was really that spazzy little chemistry student from Empire State University, there's no way I would let him dive off a roof to try to catch me (and by me, I mean whatever chick is playing MJ). But because I don't know who he is, I just trust the mask. I listen to his voice. And I go about my day.

Broken Wheel

"Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives."
Chuck Palahniuk

About two weeks ago, my knee betrayed me. I have no job, and I have no dependable schedule, so I am clothed in the evils of idleness. I do nothing all day which acts as evidence that I have existed that day. I make sandwiches, I ride my bike, I watch and listen to podcast debates, and I do one-legged pushups on the floor of a cramped bedroom. In the case that I had entered a time machine and I was concerned about irreversibly altering the future by polluting the past, this is the sort of life I would have to life in order to make sure that I affect nothing. Twelve days whipped by like the leaves of a flipbook, and I have made nothing with them. I hope that I do not have to experience this fate, but if it happens that I am one day lain in bed and around me are gathered the people I love, it is possible that I will look back on days like these have been and think to myself, there is no limit to what I would give to have those days back for the doing. I should crumple up the time I waste and shoot it at the wire basket next to my desk, like so much paper that is issued from the hands of writers who are obsessed with--and constantly motivated by--attempting to produce things of merit. I am often one of these; I have not been, recently, and my mood has soured noteably as a consequence.

For the emotional price I have paid by way of this lassitude, I have accrued quite a bit intellectually. I have watched or listened to something north of 20 debates and lectures, mostly revolving around the topics of religion, international human rights policy, or freedom of speech and press. I wish I could record the massive amount of thinking that I've done about these topics as a result of the impressive discourse, but sometimes the density of the material, combined with my poor organizational skills when I'm so furious with ideas, makes it impossible to summon order, especially among the interlacing topics. Here is a very brief list of the blogs which could come as a result of my only best use of time during my convalesence. My hope is that I will be able to turn this attrocious negative into something of a positive and productive experience, although my mood tonight, which is typical of how it has been most of the week, usually fosters either vitriol which I am sad to have thought or slop which I am embarrassed to have written. Intellectually and emotionally, then, it is obvious that I have good reason to resolve both my attitude and my body, but both of them are slow-going and neither mechanism cares much about my preference for not being ill.

1. Something comprehensive about my view on the role of religion in the world. This will easily be several essays, both perscriptive and descriptive. Specific topics needs to include dogmatism of any kind, the role and import of conversation, and the stricture that religion places around the neck of the global struggle to establish and ensure human rights. In each of these instances, I'm not sure that I can manage to reduce away the terrible fear I have about the way in which history will judge the time in which I lived.

2. Something about the terrible legacy of quarreling and antagonism beset upon us by the last administration, and the events that took place in its duration. I cannot listen to a single news telecast or talking heads show anymore without wondering what percentage of the truth I'm hearing. I very regularly hear two people say opposite things about the same event or person, so I believe there is one of two things happening. Either one or both of the people is wrong, or one or both of the people is lying. In either case, the quality and quantity of information to which I have access is depressing; the horrid clumsiness of intellectual pursuit confounds me every single day of my too short life. Should I have to constantly figure out whether or not I am receiving the truth, and how much of it? How can there be partisan news? Why can I not rely on something to just relate one small set of facts in a row? Nothing could be goddamned easier than this, and none of you will do it: you must taint everything. Well this is the world we have, because of it.

3. A short story I am working on about a man whose birth date had been confused.

4. A social contract theory for backpackers.

5. There is a Tennessee Williams quote that goes like this: "Why do I write? Because I found life to be unsatisfactory." So, something about that.

6. One of my primary historical interests, and political interests for that matter, is revolution. I have begun working on a short essay, informed by the ideology present in the entry about Dublin, that revolution must be non-violent in order to be successful.


Oh, to be able to travel again.

Adriaddicts

11 April 2009. Saturday.

We had one more gelato before we left Split, but you can hardly hold it against us. The lemon flavor was transcendent: we have talked about it several times since we left, and we have conducted several comparative experiments since. It is a serious business, this ice cream sampling, or at least we have made a habit of pretending that it is.

Zipping down the Croatian coast, we stared out the windows as the scenery whirred past us. North of Bosnia, most of the landscape is truly picturesque: the crags are gnarled and gumdrop purple, and peppered with dark, feathery trees. The fields on both sides of the road are rich with these boulders until about 150km south of Split, when the small clusters of rocks give way to impressive mountains with striations of grape crops. The ridges in the east cut across the sky like the edge of construction paper after a pass with those rifled designer scissors. The juxtaposition of the Croatian ranges augments the beauty of the horizon, which turned thirty shades of blue as encroached on Bosnia.

It was time for a swim around 14:30, so we hopped off the coastal road and parked on the top of a hill that overlooked a solid rock beach. Once again without a plan, we sauntered down the choppy hill, leaping from pathway to amorphous pathway in order to reach the rocks 100m below us.We were assailed on several occasions by these large winged insects that looked quite a lot like clothespins. There were no snakes in the hill, but our suspicion that there may be was still elevated enough to make us test every footstep we took before we committed, as if the ground we were stepping on had the potential to be extremely hot, and we kept having to make sure.

Arriving on the rocks was only the first challenge we faced that day. We tested out the shards of coral that lined the shore, trying to determine whether or not they were stable, first, and moreover, whether it would kill our feet to use these as our diving boards. After toeing the water a bit, and bemoaning how much of a shock jumping off would be, we charged boldly into the fray: and yeah, it was chilly. I recall yelping. The water was crisp and a strong light blue, the way you would imagine glacier water to be. We could see maybe 10m down, so we were sure that we in no danger of hitting the bottom. The danger came from a less conspicuous source: the treacherous sea urchins which punctuate the coast like pindots on an Italian silk tie. After our third dive, Adam swam back to shore and clung to the vertical-pancake rocks, scooping his feet towards the platform just under the wave break. I immediately heard a chirp to my left, and saw Adam scoot backwards, wincing: SHARP, he yelped. Shark? No no, sharp! Agghhh!

Back up on the shore, it looked like we had gotten away safely. Three half-inch spikes jutted out of the sole of his right foot, near his pinky toe. Quickly plucking them out and dispatching them into the Adriatic, Adam brushed his foot and examined again. We discovered another 20 smaller spines buried deeper under the skin, only grapite pencil dots now, after the pressure of walking around on the rocks. Over the next couple of hours, and after our arduous hike back up the hill, we efforted to extract as many of the bastards as possible. About 15 still remain, but the pain has greatly subsided. Adam has been an incredible sport about the whole thing, insisting that he can hike with us all day, and leading the initiative to jump of some of the higher cliffs that we have found in Croatia. His pain has, to some immeasurable extent, been abated by a traditional Croatian remedy for sea urchin wounds: an olive oil wrap for three nights consecutive, which is meant to coax the spines from the skin and to numb the skin sufficiently to bear the pain of walking around.

Onwards we sped, then, towards Bosnia, which was an anti-climactic episode: we had truly hoped to receive a stamp at the border, but our passports were not even inspected. Once again, we are victims of the pain often faced by three modestly dressed middle-class white males. When will the prejudices end? Just around the bend from Bosnia, the crayon box of Dubrovnik is visible straightaway. The coast is decorated with houses and beset with very small motor boats for short-term skips between the twelve hundred islands just to the west. We matriculated into the city and found some provisions for the night, located our hostel, and ascended the stairs to down our welcome drinks. In small chalice-type shot glasses, the man who owns the property served us a honey liquor made with grapes from Croatia. To us, and no one else, we said.

After some warm-up exercises on the hostel patio, we ripped into Old Town. Along for the ride is a lovely French Canadian girl called Stephanie, who has been here for several days and had already received a tour of the city. We sliced through the castle walls which were modest and beautiful, and dotted with bullet holes. The ramparts are entirely lit in a muddled orange light, so the entire castle looks haunted and ancient. But just below them, the Easter parties raged with great fervor, especially at the gay bar and the pub just next to it. The chair cushions here were purple and pink and orange, cow-print and leopard-print, fluffy and welcoming. We had travarice, several more pints, and some pretty intense laughs about our surroundings. The end of the night wrapped up with a compliment about my shorts–or shirt, depending on how you interpret the accent–a lesson about Croation pop music, an interjection about Michelle Obama, a Facebook request, an ironic hi-bye interchange across the way from the parking lot, and a great deal of fatigue. Good morning, Dubrovnik.

12 April 2009. Easter Sunday.

Religion: the enemy of commerce. It turns out that there are no shops open on Easter, which we knew, but that there are no…things…open either. This set a fantastic opportunity to go to Lokrum, the island about 4km from Dubrovnik. Of course, to prepare us for the journey, we felt that one more helping of gelato would probably be a wise investment. Lemon, please.

A 40kn boatride later, we rolled into the docks in front of Lokrum’s park, and were greeted by some shrill coos from the peacocks housed there. The F.K.K. awaited us, so we veered north around the island and found ourselves on a rude beach made of enormous boulders and canyons. Water sucked into the alleys between the sunning spots, spraying our feet and misting the air. We skipped the beach. Around the bend and totally secluded, we found a natural cove with the clearest water I have ever known. It was a 50 meter expanse made of blue marbles, at least 30m deep and pummeled by waves. Cliff diving, ladies and gentlemen.

We, uh. We..don't know.

8 April 2009. Wednesday.

The day started off a bit later than we had supposed it would, mostly for the reason that we had failed to account for our propensity to screw around for inexplicably lengthy periods of time. One of our favorite pre-departure diversions was a mashup game of soccer and baseball, which ended with a sharp line drive into the middle of the lake, and a failed attempt to rangle the errant ball with a bit of a lakeside branch. We were not fazed, and were indeed encouraged by the advent of a particular finding: nutella and bread from the Schloss kitchen. We also took three packets of jam.

Just before we left Salzburg, I suggested that Adam and I might give our manual car a try. After all, having grown up in the States, we were relatively new to the idea that driving could not be done whilst eating a cheeseburger and texting for sports scores, and that one should indeed need to pay attention to shifting gears and tapping a troublesome third pedal. Right around the time that the clutch started to sound like someone was running a roll of quarters through a paper shredder, I decided to switch spots with Daniel and let him drive the ten total hours to Split, bisected on our first night by a short rest in Rijeka. Having thus ceded the driver’s seat, I took up the passenger spot, and Adam sprawled in the spacious (read: miniscule) backseat. He and he alone was to be the guardian of our snack cache, which was comprised largely of the sorts of things that mothers get mad at their kids for eating too much of when they’re 7.

Our plan was to have left by 2pm RST. Given the gracious buffer between our planned time and our probable time, our 8:06pm departure was about half an hour early. We commended ourselves by eating Austria’s version of the Gala apple, a pink and sunburst-yellow beauty of a fruit which, while it lacks crunch, is nonetheless the size of a softball and was thus sufficient for our dinners. Onwards then, we sped towards Hallein and Villach and Lublijana, making good time and fighting back the stinging urges to sleep. We were sustained by 80s rock, several Beatles discs, window breeze bursts, and open-ended questions.

Daniel was a bit sick, so we decided to blitz to Rijeka and knock out in a hostel. Yeah, it’s that easy, we thought: navigate to a country which we have never seen or studied, linguistic fluency for which we do not possess, a map for which we do not have, and with zero idea about how to locate a place to sleep. Foolproof, yeah? We thought so. Well, the darndest thing happened, to tell you the truth: we ended up on a one-way street between a shipyard and an abandoned garage, small matchbox cars zipping past us, staring at an insufficient GPS tracker, and confronting groups of teenaged Croatians about the direction of a suitable hostel. Each of these is a circumstance which is, on its own, less than desirable: together, they are at least formidable, and when it’s 6 degrees outside and you’re wearing madras shorts, they’re nearly unbearable.The young man who offered us directions while the other chatted in Croatian was pleasant enough, but he had an extremely low opinion of the district:

Daniel: We are looking for this place, the Hostel Rijeka.

Croatian: What’s the..why do you come to this shithole town called Rijeka?

Daniel: We, uh. We..don’t know. But we would like to sleep.

Croatian: Yes, that is the good thing to do here.

We plodded down a graffiti-checked street to the hostel which we’d discovered, and then to another, because the poor man’s Rivers Cuomo who ran the hostel said that he was completely booked. Three hostel options later, we decided to park in the lot adjacent to a small lodge off the highway, and to contort ourselves in such a way that sleeping became possible, although not familiar.

The sun comes.

9 April 2009. Thursday.

The next part of our marathon journey started omniously: a bottle of John Jameson Irish Whiskey was left outside the car during our morning tooth brushing session, representing our first casualty of the trip. It will surely be accompanied, although we will try our hardest to make sure that this is not the case (so far we have been successful in this regard, having cleanly polished each soviet red can of the pint cases which we buy daily). Point in fact, there were many ominous symbols on the way to Split, which became our destination on Thursday night when we figured out that Dubrovnik was farther to the south than our wafer cookies would last us.

First, on the side of the road around kilometer 278, there was a massive fire in the center of a rocky expanse to the west. The plume billowed out across the rocks as if it had no origin whatever, but instead engendered itself from amidst the ruby stones and tilted huts which polka-dotted the Croatian landscape. It rose maybe 70 meters in there air, and eclipsed the sun when we laced back towards the coast, temporarily darkening the road ahead. We speculated that it may have something to do with the Easter festival which is taking place this weekend in the devoutly religious country. None of us being a particularly religious man, we did not have any way to justify this supposition, but we felt satisfied, and we celebrated our detective victory with a bit of a baguette which we had bought before leaving Salzburg.

Arriving in Split was simply the first of our tasks before finding the hostel which we had reserved for the night. Our GPS navigator, which we refer to exclusively as “TomTom,” lead us in concentric circles and mobius strips for not less than an hour an a quarter, before we found our site: Silver Center Hostel, affixed just in between the main square of the town and the sleepy marina to the south. The place is on the second floor of one of the set pieces that is used in Saving Private Ryan: an entirely cement building, the ground floor of which is home to a pile of thirty lunchpail-sized oblong stones, broken wall lamps, deteriorating stairs, and exposed electrical wires. On the second floor, we found ourselves in the middle of a delightfully confined makeshift hostel, four rooms and twenty-six beds in total, with the nicest hosts you can imagine.

This city is a very nice one indeed, but it gives you the impression that it is constanly undergoing an identity crisis. It is as if the entire port is the product of a architectural equivalent of some culinary experiment in which Roman columns and facades were thrown into a salad spinner alongside modern docks, cabanas, cafes, and promenades. The resultant city is our lovely Split, whose name fairly accurately reflects the personality of its scenery. It’s a strange thing to swerve through the cobbled streets and to see tagged walls across from massive designer shopping malls, question marks and famous faces painted all over the place, like a city-wide public art display.

10 April 2009. Friday.

We did a bit of the ocean today. About a kilometer to the southeast, Split’s only sand beach is the playground of the speedo-clad and muscle-bound. On this eyelash of a sandbar, they play this game with a little racquetball which roughly resembles catch, except that no one ever catches the ball; or volleyball, except that no one erected a net; or dancing, except that someone brought a racquetball. Adam and I ventured into the ocean while Daniel tuned out on the beach. We had shuffled about 80 paces into the sea, and the water took its time to creep slowly past our knees. Adam, the more courageous, heaved himself into the water as I riffed “Final Countdown,” and I doused my head in the tepid crystal clear water. Back to the shore we strode, kicking the water which started to slink back towards our ankles. On the shore, we played question games as we fell asleep in the afternoon sun: if you had to pick a president to come with us on the trip, who would you choose?
Jackson. Eisenhower. Teddy Roosevelt, we said. Daniel wants Senator Joseph McCarthy, for meddlesome reasons..

This Is What a Travel Journal Looks Like

I have heard from a couple of people, most notably and persistently my mother, that she figured that this blog would be more of a journal about traveling. It has become something very different from that: right now, it isn't much more than a portfolio. So, for the six people who have ever read this blog, and principally for my mother:

Alright, already. Here it is. Dublin, Amsterdam, and Marseille.

My City Tour

Dublin Blues

I have always had reservations about caring for people, or maybe ‘difficulty’ is a better word for it. It seems to me that some folks just flatly do not appeal to me, or that maybe I am acting in self-interest in not expanding myself too broadly. I have always been better at keeping a close group of friends who are very dear to me, and quite a bit worse at keeping up very many relationships at once. Maybe a part of it is, I feel like I am able to be more of a part of my family if it is relatively small.

I care for cities in sort of the same way. Whenever I travel anywhere, I sort of identify with some part of the city I visit which is in a small way the same as I come to love a friend. Dublin is one of the chief representatives of the group of places for which I care very deeply, at it has been for several years, since the epic union. There is something about the way that the roads there are built, that the people cover up with their collars, that the bars push out string music. Dublin has a unique quality for me, which combines the fantastic and modern with a quaint and noble past. I wince when I think about the way in which cities in the States could never be this way, and moreover how the people are just not designed for it to carry the kind of charm that pulses in Ireland. The sadness here, which I cannot separate from even my fondest thoughts of a nation, is that sometimes the city that you love rips into you in the same way that a person can.

The latest round of political action in Ireland is largely divisive and tremendously violent. Several of the splinters of the Irish Republican Army have taken responsibility for shootings which have rippled through the country over the past couple of months. These attacks, which take place largely in Protestant communities, are being forged against the members of opposing religious factions, and especially against members of the garda or other representatives of the state.

I can understand the appeal of rebellion and of uprising, and even of widespread and enduring angst. I very often fell the desire to react in a more extreme manner towards an opposition which seems to me to be domineering and mislead, including having my interests far from its focus. I cannot tell how often I have my most extreme emotional reactions to these very relationships: it is rage, and frustration, and restlessness, and contempt, and it has to burn itself out every time I get to thinking. In all cases, it seems to me that the problems that I face, when laid against the problems which brew between Irish factions, are not close in duration or in degree. However, I do identify with the climate and the emotion, and my complaint is this: why is war your solution, my rebel brothers? I cannot imagine a world in which one group can strong arm another and produce a better world as a result.

Now, I can conceive that a person or a group could be a rightful or desired winner, and that that group can dispatch an evil or maleficent one. Surely this must be the case, from time to time, or even very often. But the strain which is persistent is the foolish and dangerous axiom that violence solves problems, and any instance in which this is true simply propagates a world in which the eil group continues to persist, and for the very reason that others were defeated. Groups which lose wars of ideology do not go away when they are put down. Indeed they are emboldened by the idea that they might have success the next time if only they can be even more lethal, and how can this breed a better people?

This taste for distaste is a terrible thing, and the worst bit of it, philosophically speaking, is that it works if you look only at each case individually: you see a victory and a loss, and this is a normal thing in any contest. In the loss, of course, you can see shame, or guilt, or anger, and there is a regrouping effect after it. In the victor, you see thrill or relief, ego, and sometimes you are thankful for that party who fought and who succeeded. But you never hear the airy peal of the violins. You see the bundled up street crowds glance away from each other, and the stones in the cobbled streets look just a little more cracked, dirty, and farther apart.

I Amsterdam

We all know the exploits of the political scene in Amsterdam. The social allowances, lets say, such as the government sanctioned sex trade and the relaxed rules on drug enforcement. These and other norms are famous among travelers my age, and are indeed most of the reason that anyone I've met along my way is interested in visiting the city. And fine: it seems that the Red Light and the coffee shops are tremendously popular for the locals just as well as the tourists, very likely for the reason that there is no great hang-up about either of those earthly delights. Both of these practices are freely viewed and, in fact, smelled. Actually, it is marginally difficult for an unfamiliar wanderer of the city to choose just a regular coffee shop instead of one which purveys drugs, and in some districts, the windows go dresses-dresses-shoes-chicks-purses.

At home, you get two kinds of people, basically. One sort will call himself "morally and ethically opposed"--whatever that means--about the sorts of liberties that Amsterdam boasts. The other is into both of of those trades, and is in favor of them really because he'd like it to be easier for him to have access to sex and drugs. I find it difficult to blame the second guy. But there is a better reason to support such liberalism: the city works perfectly. The violent crime rate is extraordinarily low, especially compared to our land of the self-proclaimed free. It is wonderfully clean, and more than that, it is beautiful and manicured with rolling hills and lawns. The people are friendly, giant, extremely well-educated, and distractingly good looking. There are more bikes in Amsterdam than prayers in the Vatican, and the whole nation is one of the world leaders of the environmentally conscious movement. The public transit is safe, and logical, and efficient--look, the whole place is pristine. Every adult is allowed to behave as if he were an adult, and they do with a much higher frequency than they do in the Silicon Valley. The economy also benefits tremendously, as does the populace, I would imagine, from the industries which are strictly maligned in the States. But why are they? They clearly do not hurt the morale or the general spirit: everyone here is extremely gracious and openly welcoming. The quality of the education and the intellect of the average Dane are certainly not lacking: everyone I have met speaks Dutch and perfect English, and very frequently either German or French or both. Interestingly, the most notable negative wave I am aware of in Amsterdam is one that is made possible by their overarching principle of understanding: religious fundamentalism, which indeed conflicts with and forbids the famed practices of the city, is certainly the leading cause of violent crime in the region.

The only regrettable facet of the culture which I have internalized is, how terrifically impossible it would be for our nation to adopt anything like this. The amount and persuasion of tolerance that the States offers is absolutely absurd: it is the truest definition of an illusion to announce that we are founded upon an emphasis on civil rights and liberties and that we live up to this credo. Each European city I have been in, including Amsterdam, has been an occasion for a conversation about the invasive extent of the American legal system. Is that not shocking enough? Students from other countries are aware of and concerned by the degree to which the United States restrict practices and views which they commonly view to be inalienable, or the way in which it similarly mandates things which are so obviously inane and unnecessarily complicated. We permit very little, I have come to realize; we are decades behind many countries' efforts to extend rights to citizens and, notably, their environmental practices. We are laden with war and fundamentalism, shouting and emotional outbursts, celebrity gossip rags and dating trivia. The daft is the easy, is the accepted, is the appreciated. This unfortunate link makes progressive liberty not only absent, it makes it impossible.

Marseille

This place sparkles like San Francisco, and it smells pretty similar too. I can never quite find my way around by way of actual street familiarity, as I am eventually able to do even in towns which are short-lived. Instead, in Marseille as in San Francisco, I generally point myself in the direction of the thing I am looking for, and move that way until I find a landmark or, better, a sign. The streets are polka-dotted with gum and cigarettes, and the homeless population is as abundant, aggressive, and aimlessly talkative. The attitude in the street here is much the same as in The City. There is a sort of funky vibe to the younger Marseillais, but mixed with a feeling like they or their fathers are very reliably in the fishing trade. There are lots of knit, handmade-looking clothes here. Wide-cable knit sweaters, scarves, ill-fitting dresses which look trendy or messy depending on how cute the girl is. It's the sort of place where there are tons of shops, but not many stores. Everything looks to be makeshift and humble, as if the actual buildings are hand-me-downs.

The harbor beams. It is packed with boats which are worked on and loaded and cleaned and inspected every day, while the gulls oversee the activity. The city appears to have two suns; one of them lives under the ocean and blasts through the surface of the water as long as his skyward brother keeps him company. Cafes and boutiques are everywhere, so there is a lot of plate clinking and soft paper flitting. The breeze rips everyone in the city and pushes them through the hilly streets and along the winding coastline.

Spoken Word

The core session on the role of translation began today. The keynote speech was given by Esther Allen of PEN World Voices New York, who hazarded several challenges about the current state and future of translation. I have virtually no experience in the subject at the moment, but the speech was extremely interesting for its first allusion. In order to tease out the genesis of the problem of translation, Allen called upon the story of Nimrod, whose frustrated appearance in Inferno rouses a harsh scold from Virgil the intellectual. Nimrod is the giant who conceptualized the Tower of Babel, a mutiny which, as the legend goes, rendered the world pluralingual. The punishment that he suffers in hell is noncommunicability; he is unable to understand anybody, is likewise unable to be understood, and rails against his misfortune by belting thunderclap blasts on a tremendous horn. Allen's relation illustrated the lesson that often, this is the very dilemma-turned-paradox that many linguists constantly face: some pieces, for all their nuance and organic beauty, are impossible to translate properly, and still others are so vivid and common to the human experience that they do not require any translation at all.

This dichotomy underscores a principle point, as far as I can tell, about the objection many might have about the nature of translation. Allen notes that an enduring feeling amongst the academic community is that the new work is necessarily of a different, perhaps lesser quality or merit than the original, because it is impossible to put the original author's whole meaning into equivalent foreign words. Additionally, the translator's interpretation of the content of the text is just as prone to misunderstanding at it would be if any reader attempted the original, and it is difficult establish definitively whether a particular translator or reader has provided a version which is more convincing than another. But this idea seems to be more incomplete, the more correct it is. If it is so that language, experience, worldview, and other aspects of culture are so ingrained in the translator and his language that even so skilled a wordsmith loses the original beauty of the text, it cannot be too far of a step to imagine that an average reader in the original language also experiences a novel, an essay, a piece of poetry, or indeed a speech, song, movie or sitcom through this same sort of corrupting lens; it is a non sequitur to condemn translation, because this problem of misunderstanding is common to anyone's experience of any piece of art. If we extrapolate this point, then each great piece of literature has a qualitative deficiency that is proportionate to the amount of diversity in the society which reads it: the more differences between the author and the readership, the higher the likelihood that the piece is going to be misunderstood. Thus, it appears as if literary translators would not necessarily introduce anything corrupt by way of their art that an average reader would not introduce anyway; the specific problem that a translator might contribute seems to be a slightly different one.

At this point, it should be mentioned that the entire argument I am making is inextricable from my belief that in many pieces of literature, the author intends to present a specific message or set of messages; this is an easily disputable issue, and I would imagine that especially among literary translators, the opinion that literature is made even more vibrant with every new reading of the work is equally contended. The problem here is semantic: if literary translation is an art, then it must be referred to as a science just as well, at least in terms of the words used to describe it qualitatively. Regarding a poem or a mathematical proof or a touchdown pass, one could use any one of the synonyms of beauty; but for a translation, this is not so. If a translation is called something like beautiful, it seems to me that this is either a misnomer or a bad thing. When a reader calls a translation beautiful, he could actually mean that the text he is reading is beautiful, or, in other words, that if the translation is accurate (a tenuous word in itself), then the original work is beautiful, and that the translation reflects the quality of the original work. To be reductionist, we might instead say that the translation is good, and that the original work is the one that is beautiful. Alternatively, if the reader truly means to deem the translation itself beautiful, it seems to me that that adjective might support the charge that translation is an intrinsically flawed practice: if beautiful is accurate, that one word represents the dissolution of the original author's voice by highlighting the presence and skill of the translator. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does act as sort of an asterisk for the new piece, which is to say that it should be read as a translation which is additionally a commentary, which may very likely be intentional.

Perhaps we should rather abide by the vocabulary that is more commonly associated with science, not art, both in terms of a goal and an evaluative metric. Of course it is possible for a translation project to look more like a work of art, because these projects seem to be more exercises than assignments. We learned today that there is an author in the States who is taking all the English versions of Comedia, and making a unified English translation of all of those first translations. There was a similarly playful work published in the recent past, in which the dialect was that of rural 19th century Australia. Examples such as these are clearly in a different category from traditional translations, and they more easily fit into the artistic category: the voice of the translator, or some distinct skill that he possesses, is unmistakable. But to bring this same voice to all translated works would, I think, be a tremendous disservice to the canon of second-language works. There is something to be said for those types of creative productions; but also worthy of merit are the translations which intentionally pursue a very precise translation of the words contained in the original text, which may allow a foreign reader insight into the literary technique of the place and period; and further still, equally valuable are the productions which are not necessarily word-for-word transcriptions, but instead are themeatically identical, and would therefore consider a sort of cultural translation as well as a lingual one. If the practice of performing only beautiful translations is instituted, it is plain to see how quickly the closest version of the original work would be a forgotten pursuit; we would be incalculably worse off for it.