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Not long enough

Here’s a quote from this morning’s reading:

“We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines nominate, and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return.”

— Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953)

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The Price of popcorn pimp hats

In my previous post, I mentioned how little of a crap I give for contemporary literature. There are very few works of fiction published this decade that particularly impressed me. Two of those books were Lush Life and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

In what seems to be an attempt at taking over the New York Sun‘s slot as Official Media Venue of Gil Roth, New York Magazine got Richard Price and Junot Diaz, the authors of those two books, to sit down for a conversation about New York City in the mag’s 40th anniversary issue. The rest of the annivesary issue looks mighty impressive, but I sat down to read this piece before any of the others.

NY: You must have seen neighborhoods evolve in all kinds of ways over the last 40 years.

RP: When you go to Harlem now, all the franchises are there—Starbucks and Linens ’n’ Things. It’s the same eight stores that are metastasized everywhere. And in neighborhoods where people have money, they’ll say, “Oh, a Starbucks, another fucking Starbucks.” But in Harlem, it’s like, ‘Hey, Starbucks, man! Häagen-Dazs and Baskin-Robbins! Yowee!” We’re all thinking There goes the neighborhood, and they’re thinking Here comes the neighborhood.

JD: Me and my girl beef about this. I know this is a weird thing to desire, but when you feel locked out of the larger culture, even if it’s a consumer-capitalist one, that’s a lot, bro. You know, there’s not a bookstore, and there’s not a place you can go if you wanna spend $5 for coffee. It weighs on people, man. It feels like you’re isolated, and you are. My girl loved it when a Starbucks opened up. But I’m one of those fuckers who’s like, “Naw, man, it’s corporate!” I’m like an idiot.

I gotta sit down and read Diaz’s short story collection somedarntime.

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Dyn-o-mite!

Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy and the lead judge for the Nobel Prize for literature, believes American writers are small-minded boobs:

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

Or waitasecond: he is a small-minded boob. My bad.

“You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.

“And if he looked harder at the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the generation of Roth, Updike, and DeLillo, as well as in many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English. None of these poor souls, old or young, seem ravaged by the horrors of Coca-Cola.”

Not that I give much of a crap about contemporary literature, American or furrin.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of glory

At my college graduation, a girl with whom I’d had a fling gave me a hug and then whispered to me, “You’re the most nauseating prick I’ve ever met.” I told her, “Hey! It’s a superlative! I’ll take it!”

Which brings us to Of glory (pp. 568-81). The opening of this one has a tone much different than that of the other essays:

There is the name and the thing. The name is a sound which designates and signifies the thing; the name is not part of the thing or of the substance, it is an extraneous piece attached to the thing, and outside of it.

God, who is himself all fullness and the acme of all perfection, cannot grow and increase within; but his name may grow and increase by the blessing and praise we give to his external works.

On the strength of that, I feared we were heading back into Sebond territory, filled with condemnations of man. While M. does lambaste man’s desire for glory, he doesn’t directly, repeatedly and explicitly contrast this with the nature of God, beyond that opening passage. “Theology treats this subject amply and more pertinently, but I am hardly versed in it,” he tells us.

So what does he make of glory? Well, it’s a mug’s game, but everyone falls for it. M. points out that even Epicurus, whose maxim was, “Conceal your life,” betrayed himself in his final letter by reveling in his learning and requesting all manner of posthumous celebrations.

In his arguments, M. intertwines glory and virtue, with the goal of undercutting glory. To do this, he needs to show how virtue is greater than glory, because it’s not public. Glory is, by its definition, public opinion, so it creates the perverse incentive of not performing a worthy act if it’s not going to be witnessed/talked about by the public. Virtue, on the other hand is “the testimony of our conscience,” and connects us to God, rather than to the people.

Further, glory depends on chance and opportunity. Just as RBI leaders need runners on base ahead of them, storied figures from history need the right circumstances to achieve their renown. That doesn’t stop sportswriters from overrating RBI leaders and voting them up as MVPs.

And sometimes, M. points out, even if the right circumstances arise, there’s no one to record the honor:

The fortunes of more than half the world, for lack of a record, do not stir from their place, and vanish without duration. If I had in my possession all the unknown events, I should think I could very easily supplant those that are known, in every kind of examples.

Why, even of the Romans and the Greeks, amid so many writers and witnesses of so many rare and noble exploits, how few have come down as far as our time!

Like I said, it’s a mug’s game. At the conclusion of the essay, he admits that there’s a certain utility to public glory: inspiring the people to virtue: “Since men, because of their inadequacy, cannot be sufficiently paid with good money, let false be employed, too.”

So what to make of the fact that M. is exploring the accidents and hollowness of glory, but I’m reading his words more than 400 years later? Surely that’s a form of glory, not merely his private virtue. Near the conclusion he writes:

It might perhaps be excusable for a painter or another artisan, or even for a rhetorician or a grammarian, to toil to acquire a name by his works; but the actions of virtue are too noble in themselves to seek any other reward than from their own worth, and especially to seek it in the vanity of human judgments.

I have no answer, but it put me in mind of another of this weekend’s readings: an interview with Carol Alt about glamour, fashion and celebrity.

I found this week’s essay fascinating, in part because M. admits that he’s treading over old terrain, but his view has deepened. In Of names, he writes about the temporariness of reputation and the ways in which we invest too much in the honor of our titles. Check out my writeup of that one, and you’ll see how the essays actually do show some progression of M.’s thought. Where the earlier essay barely discusses God or heaven, this one uses them at its very foundation.

But even with this evolution toward religion, M. manages to embed a paragraph in the middle of Of glory that could have come from his earlier, more freewheeling phase:

All the glory that I aspire to in my life is to have lived it tranquilly — tranquilly not according to Metrodorus or Arcesilaus or Aristippus, but according to me. Since philosophy has not been able to find a way to tranquility that is suitable to all, let everyone seek it individually.

And on that sentiment, I may as well call it a week.

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Bonus writeups!

How our mind hinders itself (pp. 562-3): No two things are equal, even if we think they are. There’s always some difference, and that’s why we choose one thing (the bottle) instead of another (ham).

That our desire is increased by difficulty (pp. 563-8): Nothing groundbreaking; we want what we can’t have. Also, M. didn’t lock up his door for decades, but no one ever tried to break in, even during a civil war. One of my neighbors has a video-camera and an electric eye set up at the top of his driveway, so I wonder what he has to hide.

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Tales from C&O 2008: Speakerboxxx

In our previous installment, I chronicled the epic fail of our USB-drive suppliers. I know you’ll likely find this stuff boring, but I offer all these details so that you guys will have some idea of why this blog doesn’t always get the attention I’d like to give it.

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Our annual Contracting & Outsourcing show has two major components. One is our one-day tabletop exhibition, which features 125 pharmaceutical contract service providers, vendors, and other companies. Over the years, we’ve fine-tuned the schedule to make sure the attendees visit the exhibit hall numerous times during that day. Plenty of exhibitors have told us that our show is the best return on investment of any event they attend, because of the quality of the attendees they meet.

The main thing that can go wrong for the exhibitors is that one’s display or materials don’t show up. This happens almost every time. Several years back, there was a logistics provider whose materials never arrived at our show. I always laugh about that.

Miraculously, there were no major exhibitor complaints this year (as far as I know). We did have one surly exhibitor the night before the show, but he turned out to be one of those bullies who turns out to be a wimp when you stand up to him.

Now, the other part of the show is the conference, which runs a day-and-a-half. We have 4 speaker sessions the first day, and 5 the second. This year, I organized all the topics, speakers and timelines (with plenty of assistance from my conference advisory board) and felt very good about the lineup. However, it’s one thing to have the lineup down on paper; it’s another to actually see the speaker standing at the podium at the appointed time. . .

Continue reading “Tales from C&O 2008: Speakerboxxx”

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Tales from C&O 2008: Warped Drives

Our 7th annual Contracting & Outsourcing conference wrapped up at noon on Friday, and the attendees, speakers, and exhibitors all went away happy, as far as we could tell! Success!

Our exhibit hall sold out in record time, and this year’s attendee count was up 50% from 2007’s; we chalked that up to a combination of going back to Thursday-Friday dates from last year’s Tuesday-Wednesday (the only dates we could get the venue, the fantastic Hyatt Regency in New Brunswick, NJ), and the lineup of speakers and topics that I assembled.

(This was the first year that I flew solo on the speaker lineup, following the retirement of the guy who used to moderate the conference and help us get FDA speakers. For months, I second-guessed almost every  decision I made regarding the topics, speakers and scheduling. Except for the one that actually failed at the show. I’ve learned a valuable lesson: never let a panel discussion take questions from the audience.)

Having such a large number of attendees meant that our registration desk staff had to be very well coordinated. My associate editor runs that part of the event, and she did a great job of figuring out how many people we could add behind the desk before we reached the point of diminishing returns, where people smack into each other while retrieving badges, badge-holders, programs, USB drives, and bags, while printing up new badges for walk-up attendees. I think she gets tired of my “we couldn’t do it without you” praise, but that doesn’t make it less true.

Our show has hundreds of attendees, a dozen speakers, and 130 exhibiting companies (most of which send more than a single employee), and it’s set up and run by 4 full-timers who are also responsible for producing an ongoing magazine, with help from several marketing assistants, who have to divvy their time among our conference and all of the other magazines they work on. So we each have checklists and timelines of things we need to get done for the show.

In addition to assembling the speaker lineup, I’m responsible for making the 52-page conference guide (with heavy assistance from my associate editor), designing a dozen or so posters for the event (thanking sponsors for breakfasts, lunches, coffee breaks and prize giveaways, displaying the conference schedule, and giving directions for the sessions and the exhibit hall), getting the presenters’ Powerpoint files together and making sure they don’t have font problems, getting the speakers’ hotel-room comps ironed out, and a million other little things. (Oh, and we have to finish the 156-page October issue.)

The other 3 full-timers also have huge sets of tasks, some of which have to be taken care of months in advance and some of which can’t be completed till the day before the show. That’s event planning for you; there are a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong, but when it all works, you feel even better about making it happen.

Which isn’t to say everything was smooth sailing. . .

Continue reading “Tales from C&O 2008: Warped Drives”

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Under the Sun

Barring a major investor jumping in during a time of financial panic, it looks like the Official Newspaper of Gil Roth will be shutting down in a week. How’s today’s Arts+ section looking?

  1. Victor Davis Hanson reviews Martin Creveld’s The Culture of War: “he presents himself as a Thucydidean”!
  2. Steven Nadler reviews Joel Kramer’s biography on the Great RaMBaM: “From Moses to Moses, there was no one like Moses”!
  3. Eric Ormsby reviews Fernandoz Baez’ history of the destruction of books: “Unlike Borges, who delighted in inventing titles which don’t exist (but should), Mr. Báez describes books and whole libraries that fell prey not only to fire and flood but to sheer human malevolence”. . .
  4. And speaking of Borges, Alberto Manguel reviews William Goldbloom Bloch’s The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel: “Mr. Bloch notes in his preface that the ideal reader of his book is Umberto Eco”!?
  5. Paula Deitz writes up the Venice Biennale of Architecture: “Two different exhibitions featured walls of refrigerators as stand-ins for enclosed spaces”?!
  6. In a rare disappointment for me, it turned out that Valerie Gladstone’s Bacon and Rothko in London does not actually involve pork products: “‘What I find amazing,’ Mr. Gale said, ‘is that even after all the preparation for this exhibition, looking at Bacon’s paintings still makes my spine tingle. I never stop being overwhelmed.'”

And a bonus! This weekend, the New York Times wrote about the Sun’s plight! While it can’t be bothered to mention the Sun’s top-notch arts coverage until a passing ref. 6 paragraphs from the end — presumably because it puts the Times’ coverage to shame — it does manage to include a quote from a writer at The Nation who called the Sun “a paper that functions as a journalistic SWAT team against individuals and institutions seen as hostile to Israel and Jews”! Awesome! Now I can miss it even more. . .

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Fear of a Grey Planet

One of the neat aspects of adopting a failed retired racing greyhound is that you become part of a community of grey owners. I’ve never been one for, well, belonging, so I’m surprised by how much I enjoy going to greyhound meet and greets and events like this past weekend’s Greyhound Planet Day picnic. The site was about an hour from our house, in Bridgewater, NJ.

(An hour unless you run into a monstrous accident, as we did on the way home, up Rt. 287. Let me tell you: when you’re on a 4-lane highway and the accident warning sign says that the far left and the far right lanes are closed, you know you’re in for a sight. In this case, a sedan was mushed up against a light pole in the left shoulder, to the point at which its spare tire was poking up out of its trunk. In the right shoulder, an SUV was flipped over, facing the wrong way, and partly flattened. Rufus was not happy with the delay, but he did his best.)

The picnic was a blast. Here are my disjointed impressions, but you may be better off checking out my slideshow and my wife’s slideshow.

To begin, I can’t even guess how many greys were on hand, but I’m going to guess it was far more than a hundred. An adoption area was set up for people to check out some available dogs, read their histories, and take them out for test drives. I stopped at the cage/crate of one of my faves from the website, Jumpin’ Jackson, who unfortunately has medical problems (seizures) but was adorable. And huge. I also checked out a bunch of the females, since we figure that, if we ever get a second grey to keep Rufus company, it won’t be a male (size, territorial issues).

In fact, my coworker/pal Jason and his wife adopted a pair of girls on Sunday; he showed up in my office Monday and asked, “You didn’t sleep the first night either, right?” Later it was, “How long did it take Rufus to go up and down the stairs on his own?” I warned him that the next 7-10 days may be pretty rough.

The first owners we met on Sunday — people frequently stop us to comment on how gorgeous Rufus is — filled us in on their dog, whom they adopted in June. He was on the track till he was nearly five years old, and ran in TWO-HUNDRED-AND-TWENTY-SIX races. Our boy, on the other hand, raced eight times before it was concluded that he was not cut out for that job. On the plus side, all the veteran racers we met were nicked up, scarred, or had other work-related deformities. So I take pride in my dog’s failure. One owner, whom we’d met previously at a meet-and-greet, told us that he was amazed by how perfect Rufus’ overall form is. He thought we were joking when we told him how terrible the boy’s racing record was.

Another neat aspect of greys is that they make virtually no noise. Except for the instances where people brought other breeds along — a few beagles and a labradoodle — the dogs really didn’t stir up at all. That said, there was a Group Roo. Watch this and try to imagine 40+ greys gathered together and getting incited to make this noise. Evidently, it’s a tradition at these events, but it’s pretty creepy.

As was The Group Photo, in which we were all herded together in the grass. It was like a grand march of very skinny soldiers. Once we were all gathered, our boy decided that he didn’t like facing the photographer and started turning around to check out the dogs behind him. We thought it would’ve been great for a group shot of 200 dogs’ faces, and 1 dog’s butt. We’ll see how the final version comes out.

We sort of took an adoptable dog on a test drive ourselves, but only because the organizers were very busy and one of the greys — Bizzy’s Barker — needed to go for a bathroom break. I thought it would be a good opportunity to see how Rufus would deal with my walking a second dog alongside him. He didn’t care in the slightest. Neither did BB. They walked in opposite directions a couple of times, and they were pretty oblivious to one another’s presence. That’s a good sign, I think.

We had a good time making the acquaintances of other owners; it’s nice not to have to start a conversation answering, “What sort of dog is that?” I was also glad to be able to ask questions of some of the veterans. They affirmed my suspicions that it’s best to cut their food back a little during winter, since neither they nor we like going on walks in the cold. I also gleaned that most owners do not take they greys on twice-daily mile-plus walks, like I do.

Anyway, there’s a ton more to write about, but I have to get to work. Check out the slideshows (Amy’s and mine) for some pix that’ll make you start thinking about adopting one of these hounds. (If you’re in NJ, visit Greyhound Friends of NJ for more info on that.

Amy, Rufus and Bizzys Barker, Sept. 21, 2008
Amy, Rufus and Bizzy's Barker, Sept. 21, 2008

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What It Is: 9/22/08

What I’m reading: Didn’t have much time to read this week, so I’m still on Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and Jason Lutes’ Berlin. I don’t anticipate getting much reading in next week, with all the work on our October issue and our conference ahead.

What I’m listening to: Meet Danny Wilson, by Danny Wilson, and The Odd Couple, by Gnarls Barkley

What I’m watching: the last series at Yankee Stadium.

What I’m drinking: Plymouth & tonic.

What Rufus is up to: Greyhound Planet picnic in Bridgewater, NJ, baby!

Where I’m going: New Brunswick, NJ, baby!

What I’m happy about: New York Magazine cited my post on The Glass Stampede in their Comments section last week:

What I’m sad about: They didn’t call me or my blog by name, so now I have yet another alias: Chimera Obscura. Sigh. I shouldn’t complain, considering I have at least six active e-mail addresses.

What I’m pondering: How working for the Long Island Rail Road seems to be a more dangerous occupation than Alaskan crab fishing.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of judging the death of others

Our first post-Apology essay from Montaigne is Of judging the death of others (pp. 556-62): not exactly a pleasant change of pace after the sermonizing of the Apology, but at least it was brief, and I was in need of a break.

M. starts this one out by referring to dying as “without doubt the most noteworthy action of human life,” but almost immediately manages to undercut the notion that most people die with dignity. In fact, he points out, most people refuse to believe they must die, figuring that the heavens will part to save them and only them: “And this comes about because we set too much importance on ourselves. It seems that the universe somehow suffers by our annihilation and that it has compassion for our state.”

Correcting our belief that our death only occurs after “solemn consultation of the stars,” M. he quotes Pliny: “There is no such association between us and the heavens that at our death the splendor of the stars should also die.”

So don’t get carried away with yourself. And if you have all sorts of wisdom and learning to share, write a book. Or have kids and raise them right.

M. moves from everyman’s denial of death to examples of suicides in history. How better to explore the judgment of death than to examine people who chose it over living? He contends that it takes a strong heart to resolve on suicide.

For color, he gives us the example of Heliogabalus, a Roman emperor whom I first read about in a mini-comic by Neil Gaiman. Sez M.:

[T]he most effeminate man in the world, Heliogabalus, amid his laxest sensualities, indeed made plans to kill himself delicately when the occasion should fore him to. And so that his death should not belie the rest of his life, he expressly had a sumptuous tower built, the base and front of which were floored with planks enriched with gold and precious stones, to throw himself from; and he also had cords of gold and crimson silk made for strangling himself, and a gold sword forged for running himself through; and he kept venom in emerald and topaz vessels for poisoning himself, according as the whim should seize him to choose from all these ways of dying: “By a forced valor resolute and brave.” (Lucan) Yet as for him, the luxuriousness of his preparations makes it more likely that he would have had a nosebleed from fear if he had been put to the test.

Gaiman writes that H. ended up assassinated by his troops and dumped in a latrine.

M.’s first set of suicides are martial captors, those who chose to off themselves rather than get tortured by their enemies. Of those, he seems to have more respect for those who failed at first attempt and chose, despite their pain, to redouble their efforts and finish the job.

After these wartime suicides, he writes about the gravely ill who either choose to forego treatment or who recover but decide, having tasted death, to embrace it. M. privileges those who take the time to think about their choice of death.

His epitome of a stout death seems to be Cato’s. Unwilling to live under Caesar, he tried to stab himself, but his wounded hand made the attempt fail. His aides bandaged him up, but he went on to rip off the bandages and then disembowel himself by hand. M. writes, “If it had been up to me to portray him in his proudest posture, this would have been all bloody, tearing out his own bowels, rather than sword in hand, as did the statuaries of his time. For this second murder was much more savage than the first.”

Frankly, I’m not sure how the Christian Montaigne of the previous 180 pages jibes with this Roman celebration of self-destruction, but it does make for more entertaining reading than the Apology, that’s for sure.

At the center of the essay, M. quotes a line from Epicharmus that I think sums up the whole piece: “It is not death, but dying, that I fear.” For these non-Christian historical figures, the best they can do is choose their time and manner of death, and face it bravely.

But that quote sent me back to one of the saddest days of my life, when my next-door neighbor / “second father” passed away in 2001. He had a heart attack, wouldn’t let his wife call an ambulance or their children, and died. That morning, standing in the yard where we spent our childhoods at play, his oldest son said those same words to me about his father. He said that his dad, after watching the lingering deaths of his own father and a brother, didn’t want to go through the hospitalizations, the sufferings and, most critically, the imposition upon the lives of those around him.

He let go. The stars didn’t weep, but his goodness propagates in his children and us.