20220202-02

… the Sophists, who taught the art of rhetoric, played a significant role in the demise of the Polis, argues Kitto in The Greeks… for Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainteancne, the Sophists are the vanquished heroes… they are the ones teaching Quality (Virtue, Excellence)… Kitto tells us they were instrumental in the demise of the polis, through which the Greek concept of aretê (admired by Pirsig) was inculcated into the people as a whole… there could not be two more different ideas of the impact of the Sophists on subsequent Greek culture and Western civilization… and Pirsig read The Greeks…

A friend gave us a couple of luffa sponges for Christmas 2020. They have been incredibly useful. It turned out they were the perfect scrubber for my cast iron pans. A little warm water and one of these can remove most cooking residue from my well seasoned pans without damaging the finish. They are a good scrubber for nonstick pans and dishes too.

They are incredibly durable. The one pictured above has been in daily use in our kitchen since the middle of last year. The two sponges my friend gave me have together lasted more than a year.

Our friend gave us dried lemon grass from their garden this year, so I recently ordered a couple more from this company in California, which appears to make them the way my friend does. You can grow luffa in your garden if you have the room. They are like squashes and need some room and a trellis to vine out over.

When they do wear out, you can toss them in the compost. Yup, pretty all-round wonderful.

20220201-07

… and now for something fun… my horoscope… Aries Horoscope | February 2022… according to it, things are looking up if i have the nerve…

20220201-06

Maus Sales Spike After Tennessee School Board Ban, Hakim Bishara, Hyperallergic

Sales of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus on Amazon have soared massively since news emerged last week about its banning in Tennessee. Four editions of the acclaimed Holocaust memoir are currently among Amazon’s 18 bestselling books after a bundle of volumes from the series topped the list during the weekend.

… it might be funny if it weren’t so sad and threatening… this article does a credible job of describing what the Tennessee school board’s objections to the book and the reaction to the ban in terms of sales of the book in question and other Maus books which were written about the same subjects…

… i can’t say whether eighth graders are psychologically ready to address a graphic depiction of a dead, nude woman who has committed suicide… i suspect that with proper guidance they are, but i am not child psychology expert… as for curse words, i find it unlikely that most of the kids didn’t know the words already…

… i am reading about Classical Greece right now… it is so interesting to see that civilizations and cultures inevitably descend down the path of disintegration… book banning is an indicator of such a descent…

… we’ve been there before, we’ve come back from the brink… will we this time?…

20220201-05

No question. Just can’t wait for your show in Austin.

When I watch you play live my soul is lifted but I am not sure what that even means. It feels religious! What is the soul? See you in Montreal!¹

… the response…

To walk on stage and perform a series of songs is an attempt to invigorate the collective soul of an audience. Whatever is happening to the soul of the audience is also happening to the soul of the performer. This mutuality is a circular and escalating intaking and outpouring of love. It is, by its very nature, a religious experience because it is in the service of a greater transcendent goodness. It is truth.²

20220201-04

The Problem with Permitting Putin’s “Sphere of Influence”, Brian Stewart, The Bulwark

Shrewd observers of U.S. foreign policy have recently claimed that the country is a superpower without a plan, but the truth is much worse: It’s increasingly apparent that America is a superpower without a coherent purpose.

By all appearances, the United States has lost faith in the global vocation it has shouldered since World War II. In the political establishment and among the general public, Americans have come to doubt the necessity of global engagement in defense of the liberal order—or, more astonishingly, even the desirability of a decent world order in the first place. This is a particular shame as well as a grave danger because the present order is very much an American creation, and it serves the national interest better than any alternative order (or disorder) that may follow the Pax Americana.

20220201-03

January 31, 2022, Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American…

CNN reported tonight that former president Trump had not one but two executive orders prepared to enable his loyalists to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. One authorizing the Pentagon to seize the machines was made public as part of the investigation by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Another, authorizing the Department of Homeland Security, has been confirmed to CNN by a number of sources, but is not publicly available.

20220201-02

The first sentences of the first paragraph of Chapter VIII, the Greeks at War, of Kitto’s The Greeks…

The Greek world was now divided. On the one side was the Athenian Empire, which men openly called a ‘tyranny’; on the other, Sparta, the Peloponnesian League, and a number of states (notably in Boeotia) that sympathized with Sparta: the first group strong at sea, the second strong on land; the first in the main Ionian, the second Dorian – not that this division in itself counted for much; Athens favouring, even insisting on, democratic constitutions among her allies, the other group favouring oligarchies, or, at the most, limited democracies. It is a familiar situation.¹

… have i mentioned what a good book this is?…

20220201-01

230.2 lbs

… i went to bed feeling upset with H who has decided to go to a concert with L at an indoor venue… they asked if i wanted to come, i said no, i wasn’t comfortable with crowded indoor venues… they asked a friend if they wanted to come… that friend said no, for the same reason… i said to H, “if you get it, i get it”… they said they had thought about that… so far, the choice is to go… there is no way to effectively quarantine in our home and Omicron is so contagious that it would be difficult to be in any shared environment and not share it… at least that is my perception of things… i am wondering what effort they will make to keep me safe… i am wondering how long i should let it sit before i ask them to let me know how they plan to keep me safe… i am a little worried they are not considering how to keep me safe at all…

… apart from the above, yesterday not such a bad day… got some things done… managed a walk… took some pictures… got some reading done…

20220131-05

20220131-04

The Red Hand Files, Nick Cave

… what a fascinating website from a fascinating creator…

20220131-03

From Heather Cox Richardson this morning…

Last night, at a rally in Conroe, Texas, former president Trump told supporters that if he runs for president and wins in 2024, he will pardon the January 6 insurrectionists. Observers note that this promise might encourage the bigger fish ensnared by the investigation to keep quiet; Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that “Trump…is committing a form of obstruction of justice in full public view.” Others note that the promise of pardoning the insurrectionists might well become a litmus test for any Republican candidate in 2024.¹

… dark clouds building…

20220131-02

… i think about the Greeks as i read Kitto’s book… there is much i admire, the bulk of which is the concept of the Polis as a living body of justice and administration and, most importantly, character building…

… local communities can do this, they can be a Polis… i am piecing together a way forward for myself, maybe others…

• Robert Pirsig’s concept of Quality
• E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Buddhist Economics
• The Buddhist Eight Fold Way as a template for right living

… it’s coming together in my mind…

20220131-01

… well, major success on the culinary front last night and then a really good night’s sleep… perhaps the world will be my oyster this AM?…

… i have decided to return to Ulysses for journaling and short, spur of the moment posting to my blog site… the work flow is simple and fast and Ulysses is a good working environment… i will continue to use Obsidian for notes on reading and research rabbit holes…

… i do have to talk a bit about the culinary success… i made the Persian rice with tahdig in a new cast iron pot i got for the purpose… most recipes recommend a non-stick pot and i had one i purchased to make this dish… however, i am determined to eliminate non-stick from my kitchen… the most suitable replacement is cast iron, but, as one fellow cook said, properly seasoned cast iron is mostly non-stick… it takes more finesse to cook a dish like this with cast iron… so, to get a perfect tahdig as i did is amazing…

… my first try was a disaster for the most part… the rice bonded to the pot like super glue… last night was my second try and the rice came out clean as a whistle which i attribute to a number of things…

• nearly two weeks of working on the seasoning of the new pot
• the use of butter as the bond breaker
• the cooling of the bottom of the pot before tipping the rice out onto a plate

… yesterday was a much better day than Saturday… laundry got done, fish got bought, family got met with, though it was just M on FaceTime… also did some tweaking of my blog… changed the theme… looks much better now…

… significant accomplishment!… Persian rice with tahdig in a cast iron pot! Non stick pot is the broad recommendation because, you know, rice sticks…

… this ergonomic mouse by Jelly Comb…

… for years i had been trying all kinds of mousing solutions because of pain in my mousing arm and shoulder… for a long time i did mixtures, switching from traditional mouse to track ball and back again periodically in an attempt to use different muscles… this helped, but i was never completely pain free… then i bought this mouse… after several months of use, i was pain free… completely… i have been using the mouse for a couple of years now… the mousing arm pain has never returned, no matter how much time i spend at the computer… your mileage may vary, but for me, this is a thing that works…

20220130-02

… they say it’s important to have a plan…

… my plan is to to write one long form titled post each week… i will set aside Saturday mornings for doing this (i am an early riser even on Sat)… content would be drawn from the past week of reading, journal writing and blog posting…

… these will be one of several kinds of titled post i produce… another is a weekly photo micro edit¹ which i have already begun…

… all titled posts will be gathered together in a monthly newsletter post…

… that’s my plan and i am sticking to it…

20220130-01

230.0 lbs

… as much as i laid around and did nothing yesterday… as much as i snacked… still a little bit of weight is lost… my fears not realized…

… yesterday started off ok, some good reading and thinking… but somewhere in the early afternoon it drove off a cliff… i just sat around and did nothing… but watch some tv… i don’t do nothing well… i need to be occupied…

… we did get a number of episodes of Foundation out of the way… good series… except… can i just say that i am growing really tired of the current fashion of story telling?… which is not to tell stories in linear fashion but to jump backwards and forwards in time leaving one to pick up the threads and weave them together…

… is it a device to cloak a weak story line?…

… the story telling fashion of the moment?…

… the result of a massively confused society?…

Alright, sci-fi fans… Foundation on Apple TV!

Reading: The Greeks by H.D.F. Kitto 📚 … just finished reading the sixth chapter… this book is so well written and completely engrossing… the sixth chapter concerns early Classical Greece and focuses on the Ionians, Spartans and Athenians… Athens is especially interesting for the way in which its widely admired culture came about… … if i have any complaint, and this might be more appropriate to direct to Greek culture of the time than to the author of this book, it’s that women are mostly absent from the history… i am about half way through the book, so i suppose it is possible a woman or two will figure into the picture somewhere… … even so, it is a fascinating book, easy to read, and has much to ponder in relation to the current political and cultural churning in the United States and around the World…

Walked over the Beacon/Newburgh bridge this AM…

On Boxing a Statue of Columbus

… this from Hyperallergic…

Hiding in plain sight, the box obscures a vast legacy of inequality without undoing it. It removes the most visible source of conflict without addressing the root causes. (The court order for the box to remain in place even cited its necessity for public safety reasons.) The box covers up the past without directly addressing it.

… more here

From The Greeks, Kitto, H

… i have been reading this book to follow up on thoughts developed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance… the principal idea of ZAMM is that there was a time when the Greeks were centered on “Quality,” as Pirsig would put it, or “Virtue,” as we might phrase it, or “Excellence,” as the Greeks put it through their word Aretê… Pirsig argues that there was a place in time when the Greeks stopped striving for Aretê… this was when the Sophists came on the scene… Pirsig, i think, believes the Sophists were the last to honor and teach Quality, Virtue, Excellence… reading ahead, i currently believe that Kitto thinks the Sophists were the ones who robbed the Greeks of their commonly understood and expressed sense of Aretê… they did this because they were itinerant teachers for hire, and the wealthy hired them to give themselves and their children an advantage in the world, which began to separate the Polis into those who could afford ‘higher’ education and those who could not and the commonly held concept of Aretê was lost… in this passage, Kitto speculates what might be if our Polis had something akin to Homer, The Iliad, and The Odyssey to base their common understanding of Virtue, Excellence and Quality on…

It is an interesting, though idle, speculation, what would be the effect on us if all our reformers, revolutionaries, planners, politicians and life-arrangers in general were soaked in Homer from their youth up, like the Greeks. They might realize that on the happy day when there is a refrigerator in every home, and two in none, when we all have the opportunity of working for the common good (whatever that is), when Common Man (whoever he is) is triumphant, though not improved – that men will still come and go like the generations of leaves in the forest; that he will still be weak, and the gods strong and incalculable; that the quality of a man matters more than his achievement; that violence and recklessness will still lead to disaster, and that this will fall on the innocent as well as on the guilty. The Greeks were fortunate in possessing Homer, and wise in using him as they did.¹

… on this point, i think Pirsig is in agreement…

Recent additions to Flattened Cans… more here…