Letters from an American, February 14, 2023
… the sad story of a very sad Valentine’s Day with, eventually, a silver lining… Theodore Roosevelt shed his “dude” image for a cowboy image, ascended to the presidency and began the Progressive Era…
From this morning’s walk…
From this morning’s walk…
Inspired by a fellow Micro.blogger, I don’t remember who it was, I made a Dutch Baby for our Valentines Day breakfast…
Books Reading: Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research by John Steinbeck 📚
Writing about Japanese factory fishing fleets in The Sea of Cortez:
We liked the people on this boat very much. They were good men, but they were caught in a large destructive machine, good men doing a bad thing. With their many large boats, with their industry and efficiency, but most of all with their intense energy, these Japanese will obviously soon clean out the shrimps of the region.
The music that came in the flac format…
Well, that was an adventure. I just dove into the world of flac audio files. Ordered an album in that format only to discover apple prefers its own lossless format. Discovered there are flac player apps. Downloaded Flacbox. All of this took about an hour. A new music rabbit hole.
Did they really think I wouldn’t notice the date?
Spirit-of-Gift
I have finished reading The Gift by Lewis Hyde. It was a very satisfying read. It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know or suspect on some level, but it deepened my understanding of the spirit of human creativity and how one needs to treat the gift of inspiration. It also firmed up in my mind the idea that there is human endeavor and expression and need fulfillment which does not fit easily into a market economy and is consequently undervalued or not valued at all in our society. The market has us so trained to the idea that only commodity has value, we have a hard time valuing and treating as important anything we can’t put a price tag on. It leaves an awful lot of what it means to be human desiccating in the deserts of capitalism.
Women have known for a long time what it is to have your production undervalued or not valued at all. More men are learning this too. Relational partnerships are coming in all sorts of configurations these days and increasingly men are having to deal with the power dynamics of not being the main bread winner.
According to Hyde, indigenous peoples have known for centuries how to value that which has no value in a civilized market. And this excerpt from The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck, is a remarkable description of the clash between an indigenous way of looking at things and a market-civilized way of looking at things:
And in our contacts with Mexican people we had been faced with a change in expediencies. Perhaps—even surely—these people are expedient, but on some other plane than our ordinary one. What they did for us was without hope or plan for profit. We suppose there must have been some kind of profit involved, but not the kind we are used to, not of material things changing hands. And yet some trade took place at every contact—something was exchanged, some unnamable of great value. Perhaps these people are expedient in the unnameables. Maybe they bargain in feelings, in pleasures, even simple contacts. When the Indians came to the Western Flyer and sat timelessly on the rail, perhaps they were taking something. We gave them presents, but it was sure they had not come for presents. When they helped us, it was with no idea of material payment. There were material prices for material things, but one couldn’t buy kindness with money, as one can in our country. It was so in every contact, and they were so used to the spiritual transaction that they had difficulty translating material things into money.
For the bulk of my life I have struggled to find a place in this market oriented world where money is power and any thing or any effort that can’t be commoditized is useless. I have always been more interested in the “useless” bits, the spiritual bits.
This past Christmas, inspired by The Gift, I decided I wanted to gift something I made with my own hands to family and friends instead of buying something and sending it. I am a photographic artist and my art is pretty good. I created what I call a photographic chapbook which is a short publication. I used high quality archival paper to print them and sowed them together myself. There were eight photographs in the chapbook, and a micro poem to accompany them. When I had shared the images with my photography salon the feed back was very positive. When I shared the chapbook with my Salon one attendee bargained me ur from $25 to $50 for it on the spot. I had reason to believe that most people would like my chapbook. I chose the book format because I didn’t want to impose my aesthetics on anybody’s walls. They could always ask me for a larger print if they wanted to have one on their walls. I gave a number of these chapbooks to a variety of people in my life. The only ones that were acknowledged in any way were the ones for which I was in the room when they were opened.
Spirit-of-gift means that when you send your product out into the world as gift, you are setting it free and shouldn’t expect a return, or that the return will come immediately or even be obvious. That’s the hard part of flowing with the spirit-of-gift. We are so deeply enmeshed in a society that expects an immediate return in every exchange it is hard to sit still when it doesn’t happen. I wonder though, if instead of gifting my chapbooks I had spent $50 on a market commodity and gifted it, what the response might have been?
Perhaps I am like the indigenous Mexicans, speaking a language hard to comprehend in my society.
I won’t give up on making and gifting. My new mantra is: “Make and gift, something will come of it.”
This pano from yesterday turned out better than I expected…
We had friends over for dinner last night. We made:
- Christmassy Braised Beef Shanks
- Roasted Brussels Sprouts
- Mashed Potatoes
- Coffee Ice Cream with Chocolate sauce.
Company was great, as was the food.
Books Reading: Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard 📚
In the novel, The Overstory, there is a female scientist character who discovers the interconnectedness of trees and the forest. This book is by the woman scientist who was the basis for the character.
Dinosaurs of the Sky: Consummate 19th-Century Scottish Natural History Illustrations of Birds
Wonderful bird illustrations!
The State of the Culture (2023)
For books to flourish… you need a culture that promotes reading. But most people happily live without those reprocessed trees. As a result, only 28 books sold more than 500,000 copies last year—and eight of them were by the same romance writer.
From Heather Cox Richardson this AM…
Yesterday the president and chief executive officer of Elon Musk’s SpaceX admitted the company has blocked the ability of Ukrainian troops to use the Starlink satellite system to advance against Russia.
Our first night out to hear music since the pandemic. Our frind Bruce Molsky, old time musician extraordinaire…
Books Reading: The Gift by Lewis Hyde 📚
During the cold war…
… when Congress failed to support American cultural propaganda, the CIA stepped in. As the director of the CIA’s International Organizations Devision later remarked of one congressional opponent: “He made it very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things that we wanted to do–send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad, whatever. That’s one of the reasons why it had to be done covertly… In order to encourage openness we had to be secret.”
… apparently, it made a huge difference for abstract expressionists…
… one has to assess every trend, regardless of how we feel about it, as something that has necessity in the universe… it’s the only way we can be honest with ourselves about what’s going on…
Books Reading: The Gift by Lewis Hyde 📚
In a land that feels no reciprocity toward nature, in an age when the rich imagine themselves to be self-made, we should not be surprised to find the interior poverty of the gifted state replicated in the actual poverty of the gifted.
Books Reading: The Gift by Lewis Hyde 📚
This is so important…
The artist who hopes to market work that is the realization of his gifts cannot begin with the market. He must create for himself that gift-sphere in which the work is made, and only when he knows the work to be the faithful realization of his gift should he turn to see if it has currency in that other economy. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.
The haunting?
Wondering if I agree with this. What do you think?
www.themarginalian.org/2023/02/0…
Prejudice is older than this age. A comparative study of animal psychology teaches that all animals are prejudiced against animals unlike themselves, and the more unlike they are the greater the prejudice… Among men, however, dissimilarity of minds is a more potent factor in causing prejudice than unlikeness in physiognomy.
My niece is a James Beard semifinalist! 4 Upstate Restaurants Named 2023 James Beard Award Semifinalists | Chronogram Magazine
Cafe Mutton
We saw this one coming a mile away. Since opening in May 2021, Shaina Loew-Banayan’s cozy corner joint Cafe Mutton has garnered praise from every corner, with lines around the block for lunch even on weekdays. In September 2022, Bon Appetit boldly claimed the spot as one of America’s best new restaurants while the New York Times noted Cafe Mutton on its coveted list of “50 places in America we’re most excited about right now.” So making it to the James Beard Åward semifinalist round for Best Chef: New York State isn’t exactly a shocker.
A crude prototype for a Terminator type AI?
Melting Robots Are the Future, Accept It
Meet the man fueling clean energy opposition in the Midwest
Aided by a small group of allies—many of whom receive money from the fossil fuel industry—Martis has helped pass dozens of laws that ban or severely restrict clean energy development in towns and counties across the Midwest. In order to pass these laws, he’s used misinformation and fear-based tactics that wind up dividing entire communities.