“Science gains from it [the pendulum] more than one can expect. With its huge dimensions, the apparatus presents qualities that one would try in vain to communicate by constructing it on a small [scale], no matter how carefully. Already the regularity of its motion promises the most conclusive results. One collects numbers that, compared with the predictions of theory, permit one to appreciate how far the true pendulum approximates or differs from the abstract system called ‘the simple pendulum’.” ― Jean Bernard Léon Foucault
Ice Sculpture
Let me look back… it was October 1 of last year when my Difficult Reads Book Club began plowing through Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. One of the reasons we chose that book was because it was a bit shorter (a mere 642 pages) than the other’s we have tackled (Gravity’s Rainbow – 770 pages, The Brothers Karamazov – only 586) and we planned to be finished well before Christmas. There were some delays… COVID related, death in the family, which delayed the schedule and we didn’t get to the end until the New Year.
It was not an overly popular book and a good number (most) of my fellow readers dropped off before we reached the conclusion. I stuck it out, however… and am glad I did.
The book was not at all what I expected. I thought it would be a thinking-man’s Da Vinci Code – but it turned out to be more of a satire on the genre than a homage. Humberto Eco was asked about the popular book:
INTERVIEWER: Have you read The Da Vinci Code?
ECO: Yes, I am guilty of that too.
INTERVIEWER: That novel seems like a bizarre little offshoot of Foucault’s Pendulum.
ECO: The author, Dan Brown, is a character from Foucault’s Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters’ fascinations—the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.
I like the idea that Dan Brown is a character from the book. It fits (except that Foucault’s Pendulum was written first).
So the book kept surprising me. I’ll admit I skimmed a lot of the center sections – they were a long, long list of various obscure (and not-so-obscure) semi-supernatural groups from history and explanations of the fictional connections between them. I understood the point right at the beginning, but there were hundreds of dense pages to make sure that point was driven home.
All through all of this, I could not imagine how it would all end. And it ended in a way I could never have imagined. There was a climactic scene of insanity and bizarre violence that answered no questions at all. It was fun. Then there was a final section of quiet nostalgic contemplation and an slight sense of almost closure – with plenty of mystery remaining.
It was a thought provoking book – I’m not sure if it was worth the effort – but I haven’t read anything remotely like it before (and doubt I ever will again).
So now we’re taking a break – I’m catching up with some of my other reading – and then we’ll decide on our next project. We are thinking about a selection of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish novels (The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974) and one other) – which sounds good to me. I’ve read Left Hand when I was a kid but remember little about it.
As an American, I’m convinced that the United States is the greatest nation on Earth. Obviously, I’m biased as hell and, frankly, I’m not interested in apologizing for it.
We’re not perfect, but I see remarkably little from other countries that look attractive enough to me to make me want to relocate. Especially when you understand what some of the ramifications are of certain policies.
If you’re someone who struggles with Sunday night anxiety, chances are you get a little restless as the weekend comes to a close. Indeed, with the weekends feeling that little bit shorter now the nights are drawing in, it can almost feel like the time is slipping away from you.
My Not-A-Purse. What is strange is that I found this image floating around on the internet – I don’t know where it originally came from. But if you look, there is an Alphasmart Neo sticking up in the bag. I can’t believe other people out there have Neos in their bags, exactly like mine.
People are strange when you’re a stranger Faces look ugly when you’re alone Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted Streets are uneven when you’re down
—-The Doors
On the way home from the store with a bag of Miller High Life.
From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Thursday, February 13, 2003
Ugly People
It had been a long, tiring day at work. A cold drizzle fell and the traffic was terrible. The hidden invisible sun set behind the darkening gray dusk so that it was night before I negotiated the endless streams of brakelights to reach my neighborhood. I had an errand to run, some item to buy (I don’t even remember what it was, now) and had little choice but to stop by the Albertson’s grocery in my neighborhood.
I don’t usually go to Albertson’s – it’s on my boycott list. In order to get their sales price on an item – you have to have a special discount card. That’s a bar-coded dohickey (most people carry a little teardrop-shaped fleck of plastic on their keychain instead of an actual rectangular wallet-card) that is issued to you once you fill out an invasive survey – sucking out all sorts of personal information. They use this to track your buying habits – and to target advertising (Spam? Telemarketing calls?) right at you.
This is something I don’t like and won’t do. Candy has filled this out and received her card – so I suppose I should too – the harm’s already been done. Or, better yet, I could fill one out with false information (Name – Dixie Normous, Address – 1600 Pennsylvania, Income – More than you can imagine…. that sort of thing) and then I’d have my barcode on my keychain and I could use the grocery closest to my house. But I won’t. It’s the principle of the thing.
At any rate, today I was too tired to drive an extra block and the item I needed wouldn’t be on sale (I remember that, though I don’t remember what it was) so I gave up my principles pulled in and shambled around the displays of peat moss, pass the giant entryway bulletin board covered with magazine come-ons and through the door into that odd stale produce, moldy ice, and sweat smell of a second-rate grocery store.
I hadn’t been in Albertson’s for a long time, but I didn’t remember how ugly everyone was. A grocery store at that time is a depressing place – people are all stopping off on their way home from work – yet it is late enough to only catch the people that work long hours. Most are buying cigarettes and microwaveable food. Unfortunately and unbelievably, it’s dry where I live and you can’t even pick up some wine or a six-pack. The best you can do is some frozen pizza-pockets, Marlborogh Lites, and maybe orange juice.
There is a resigned sullen shuffling quality to everybody. Their clothes are cheap and stained, faces fallen, wanting to get home. The Muzak is drowned by squeaking cart-wheels and crying children and the only words heard are, “Price check on vaginal anti-yeast cream” or the ubiquitous “Paper or plastic.”
The cash-only five-items-or-less line snaked way out but I knew it would be quicker than the other lines clogged with overflowing carts, food stamps, and bad checks. Still, the woman in front of me slowed everything down when the discount card on her keychain wouldn’t register on the barcode reader. The checkout clerk with bad skin huffed and carefully punched in the long list of numbers printed below the bars. It took him five tries to get it right.
I literally have no friends. I wanted to go out today and i wanted to text someone if they’re down to do something fun. BUT then i realized i have no one to ask. Like what the fuck happened.
Tina was at a crossroads. Her daughter had recently left for college, and her husband had his own pursuits. And although she’d once enjoyed banking, she now bore little interest in her work. For some time, she had been asking herself whether she should quit. But what would her colleagues and bosses think of her?
Huffhines Creek in back of my house, Richardson, Texas
“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?”
“I give.”
“You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there’s a dog.” ― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Found tacked to a corkboard by a photobooth, Molly’s At the Market, French Quarter, New Orleans
From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Tuesday, January 2, 2001Twenty years and one day ago. It’s odd to read about respiratory illness from the days (decades) before COVID
Sleep deprivation
There seems to exist, in this best of all possible worlds, a cruel virus, one that swirls around specifically at holiday time. When I’m home, with time on my hands, a chance to do some things I actually want to do for once… and the virus strikes. A world of headache, sinus drainage, ache, and worst of all, uncontrollable coughing.
The tough decision is whether or not to take cold medicine. It helps the symptoms, but really messes me up. A gulp of Nyquil and I sleep like the dead, but it stuffs my head with what feels like warm wet cotton for days afterward.
One night I tried it alone and was rewarded with an awful hacking cough every time I tried to lie down. I would bounce up and down – sneezing and heaving all night, watching the relentless movement of the clock, the red digits advancing, entropy irrevocably increasing.
That night really messed my sleep schedule up. I began sleeping later and later and staying up ’til the wee hours. I’m not a morning person anyway and am susceptible to this weakness of lassitude.
I knew it would be a struggle to get up early to make it back to work today so I tried going to bed early last night. No dice… couldn’t sleep. The alarm went off anyway.
I remember reading in the Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn saying that the worst torture was when they would simply keep him awake for days and days. Sleep deprivation. I hate it too.
Today I was a zombie at work. Dizzy, sleepy, needing REM rest. After being off for so long it was hard enough to remember my passwords and what the hell I was supposed to be doing at the place – in my deprived condition I was a mess. All I could do was dream of getting home and to sleep and watching the clock slowly tick around.
“Spider venom comes in many forms. It can often take a long while to discover the full effects of the bite. Naturalists have pondered this for years: there are spiders whose bite can cause the place bitten to rot and to die, sometimes more than a year after it was bitten. As to why spiders do this, the answer is simple. It’s because spiders think this is funny, and they don’t want you ever to forget them.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
Louise Bourgeois, Spider, New Orleans
The Ubiquity of Spiders
Sam Monaghan’s father had moved his family – Sam and his baby sister Brenda – out to the tiny town of Gilmer right after his wife had been attacked. They had lived in a brownstone in the old meat-packing district – they felt like urban pioneers. Until the one afternoon when Sam’s mother, Paula, came home from work to find the two tweakers that Sam’s father had hired to paint Brenda’s nursery waiting.
In the city, Sam had been an elite baseball player – the offensive star of a select team, The Bombers. In Gilmer, however, he had to suddenly give up the sport, which left a frustrating gap in his life, like a missing tooth in his jaw. The attackers had used his bat on his mother and he couldn’t bear to hold one in his hands again.
“Sam, I wish you would make some friends in the school here,” his mother said to him as he pushed her chair out onto the porch so she could watch the sun set.
“I know mom, I’ll try. I just don’t have anything in common with these kids.”
“What about Duane, dear? He lives on the next farm over, you can walk there whenever you want. He’s only a grade below you.”
“I’ll see mom. I’ll see.”
She was talking about Duane Clankman, who was a year older than Sam, even though he was a grade below.
The walk to the Clankman farm wound down through the creek bottoms, on an old abandoned road, not much more than a couple worn wheel ruts and a rusting iron bridge missing most of its roadway. The riot of weedy creekbottom swamp forest grew in from the sides and over the top until the way was a winding green tunnel.
The thing was, Duane had a cool old barn on his family’s farm. Over the start of the school year, Sam began to get in the habit of walking over there. The loft of the barn was full of hay bales, and Duane had arranged everything while the loft was being filled so that there were tunnels in the hay. They would pull a bale out of the opening and then crawl down a series of narrow tunnels into a pair of secret rooms hollowed out. Duane had even thought of leaving small openings for light and air.
Sometimes other kids, usually Frank, whose father was missing somewhere overseas, and Maria, whose father roofed houses would meet up there and the four would crawl through the tunnels and sit in the rooms talking about their friends, their school, their hopes and their dreams.
As the fall fell away, the sun began to set earlier and earlier. The kids smuggled some old flashlights into the hay so they could see their way out, though they would turn them off and sit in the darkness whenever they could. One day Duane showed up with some old candle stubs and a pack of matches from a bar in Broadtown, but the others convinced him it was too dangerous to light candles in the hayloft.
He’d stay as long as he dared, then Sam would rush home along the overgrown path by the light of the set sun, smeared gray and orange across the wide country sky.
“It’s late, Sam,” his mother told him as the screen door slammed shut behind him. “I don’t want you walking back from the Clankman’s in the dark.”
“It’ll be all right, Mom, there’s nothing out there, nothing to worry about.” Same saw a flash of pain across her face and the falling from the uneven spot where her broken cheekbone hadn’t healed quite right. “Really, Mom, don’t worry about me. It’s safe.”
“Well, I guess…” she said. “Here, take this flashlight with you every time, though, it’ll make me feel better.” She reached into a paper bag with a receipt still stapled to the edge and handed Sam a big four-D cell metal light. “I had your father pick this up in town for you. The nights get really dark out here.”
Sam ran his hands over the bright metal ridges along the long, heavy handle. The switch on the side had a solid, firm feel as he clicked it on. Even in the bright kitchen the beam stared out clear and strong… Sam flicked the beam into the shadows behind the table and watched the darkness flee. He grinned and felt his heart jump – this was so much better than the cheap plastic lights they had been using.
That night Sam purposely stayed around the Clankman’s until it was dark as pitch. He wanted to use his new flashlight on the way home. He walked as far as he could until the night was so black he literally could not see his hand in front of his face. He raised the heavy torch and slid the metal slide switch. The light leaped out, poured from the glass lens and the path ahead jumped into view.
He could see the twin ruts running through the center of a tunnel of scrub. He could see the archway of plants, gray-green in the beam. He was not expecting the jeweled constellations of bright lights that surrounded his path.
All along the way, bright twinkling blazing spots shot back at him. Some were white, and some were bright green. They were everywhere and Sam jumped back from this beautiful mystery. Then he gathered himself, swung the beam, and walked through. All along the creek bottoms the fiery jewels, yellow-white and emerald-green, surrounded him, leaping into life whenever his light touched them, blinking out when it swung away.
He felts his soul lightened by the sight and walked through the jeweled gauntlet, crossed the rusted old bridge, and up through the forest on the other side. The lights persisted through the creek bottom scrub and ended when he reached the fields around his family’s own place.
Sam through himself into bed, excited about the lights, flicking his flashlight under the covers, until he finally fell asleep with the torch on, still clutched in his fist.
He was dismayed to find the batteries almost dead in the morning, the bulb only a faint orange glow. He gulped down his breakfast and rushed out early to meet the bus to school. He wanted a few minutes in the salmon dawn to look at the creek path and see if he could figure out what had made the bright jewels the night before.
As he walked down toward the creek he peered into the scrubby brush, covered with thick twists of thorny vines, he immediately saw the white tufts of webs thick through and between the leaves. He picked up a stick and poked one of the webs and jumped back as a huge brown spider came crawling quickly out, jumping up onto the stick almost to his hand. At that moment, he heard the bus horn calling him and he had to abandon his quest and run for the stop.
At study hall he started pulling out the encyclopedia and then asked the librarian for help finding books on spiders. It didn’t take him long to find a picture that looked what had jumped out at him that morning.
It was a wolf spider. The book said they were very common. He felt the hair rise on the back of his neck when he read, “Their eyes reflect light well, allowing someone with a flashlight to easily locate them at night. Flashing a beam of light over the spider will produce eyeshine. The light from the flashlight has been reflected from the spider’s eyes directly back toward its source, producing a “glow” that is easily noticed. This is also especially helpful because the wolf spiders are nocturnal and will be out hunting for food, making it easier to find them.”
So that was it – the white lights were bits of water clinging to the webs and the green lights were the spider’s eyes. He sat and thought about that for a while. He thought about walking through the path, past and underneath thousands of wolf spiders. The thought didn’t bother him. He wasn’t sure why, but the spiders didn’t frighten him. Their green lights in the flashlight were too beautiful.
After school he told the other kids at the Clankman’s about the spiders. Frank didn’t seem to care, Maria was frightened, “You mean those spiders have always been there, we just didn’t know about it until you shined that light?”
“I suppose.”
“Uggh,” she cringed, “That really creeps me out. I’m never walking down there no more.”
Duane’s reaction surprised Sam. He was angry.
“I can’t believe it, all those nasty bugs down there, living along my road.”
“It’s not your road, Duane, Beside, there not hurting anything.”
“Still, who told them they could do that.”
Sam wasn’t sure what Duane was so pissed about, but he hardly talked any more that afternoon. When it was dark Sam put the fresh batteries he had brought from home into the flashlight and tried to convince the others to walk down to the creek with him and see the spider’s eyes. Nobody would go.
Disappointed, he walked home by himself, and barely stopped to look at the lights, though they were as thick as the night before.
The next morning was Saturday, and Sam walked back to look at the spider nests. He was curious about where the wolf spiders went during the day and if he could find any of them. When he looked across the bridge at the path on the other side, he saw Duane already there.
He had a big metal can with a hose running out of the top of it. There was a handle attached to the top and Duane was straining to pump the handle up and down as hard as he could.
“Duane, what are you doing?” Sam called out across the old bridge.
“I’m gonna kill all those damn spiders – that’s what I’m gon’ do, dammit,” said Duane.
“For God’s sake, let us be men not monkeys minding machines or sitting with our tails curled while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.
Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.” ― D.H. Lawrence, Selected Letters
I had heard that the new year was going to be bringing cold weather to North Texas. I opened the door this morning to bright sun and surprisingly mild temperatures. Best of all, no wind.
So I decided to go for a little bike ride – my goal was ten miles around the ‘hood. Comfortable in shorts and a T-shirt I packed up a Moleskine and my pack of portable fountain pens along with a thermos of coffee – so I could stop, sip, and write a little… if I found a good spot.
Wandering around my usual route, then a little off I decided to pedal into downtown Richardson. There are massive changes/construction going on there and I wanted to see. I was disappointed – it is all so car-oriented… and the traffic was fast and noisy. After wandering a bit I did find a little pocket park with some white metal picnic tables – a good place to sip my coffee, scribble in the Moleskine, and listen to a podcast on my phone.
The traffic noise was distracting and my Platinum Preppy spit out a gob of purple ink onto my page (as it is wont to do – have to replace it in my rotation) but otherwise everything was right with the world.
But as I wrote I didn’t notice the clouds rolling in, the strengthening wind switching around to the north, and the temperature dropping like a stone. By the time I made it home it was bitchin` cold, maybe close to freezing and the wind was howling.
Texas.
To make matters worse – my goal was ten miles but checking my Strava I had ridden only 9.92. I took the dog out for a walk and made up the difference, but only made it to the end of the block before the cold drove us back home.
Rona Pondick, Monkeys, Stainless Steel, Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, New Orleans
With this approach, perhaps you can sidestep the inevitable challenges that come with traditional New Year’s resolutions and achieve lasting, positive changes.
The last two years have seen an unprecedented escalation in a decades-long war on the American past. But there are lots of logical flaws in attacking prior generations in U.S. history.
Venus Victrix (The Judgement of Paris), Pierre Auguste Renoir & Hercules the Archer, Antoine Bourdelle, Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden
Victimhood is defined in negative terms: “the condition of having been hurt, damaged, or made to suffer.” Yet humans have evolved to empathize with the suffering of others, and to provide assistance so as to eliminate or compensate for that suffering. Consequently, signaling suffering to others can be an effective strategy for attaining resources. Victims may receive attention, sympathy, and social status, as well as financial support and other benefits
hiva Nataraja, South India, Tamil Nadu, Chola dynasty, 11th century, bronze, Dallas Museum of Art
“A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.” ― Alice Munro, Selected Stories
Large Horse by Raymond Duchamp-Villon
From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Saturday, September 12, 1998 – this is the conclusion of the story of when one of our kids’ pet Fire Bellied Toads escaped and I bought a replacement without telling them
A runaway returns
I had a lot of trouble sleeping last night. Tossing and turning and turning and tossing, I ended up on the couch in the TV room. I kept hearing a noise from the window. A tapping, or maybe a melodious scraping sound coming from the window. My exhaustion muddled mind imagined all sorts of horrible possibilities for this sound; when I’d turn on the lights, there would be nothing there.
Finally I realized that what I was hearing was simply the sound of raindrops hitting the glass. It has been almost four months since it has rained at our house, I had forgotten the sound completely.
Today I was out of sorts, headachy and tired. We ran some errands in the morning (soccer games canceled because of muddy fields) and Candy dropped me off at home while she took the boys to a church carnival. I made an omelet and was sitting on the couch eating, watching “Planet of the Apes” and generally trying to imitate a vegetable when a movement in the kitchen caught my eye.
There he was, hopping across the tile floor, heading out of the kitchen, our missing toad. I guess he’s been hiding behind the cabinets or something; luckily I was there to see him make his run. He was hopping pretty well, seemed no worse for wear for his few days on the lam. I scooped him up before the Giant Killer Dog woke up and deposited him back into the aquarium.
We had to come clean with the kids, had to tell the truth about why there were now three fire bellied toads in there. They weren’t upset at our deception, only happy that we now have three toads.
They decided to call the new one “Runaway.”
And a Short Story for today:
You could argue about whether or not Alice Munro is the best short story author of all time… but there is no argument that there are none better. She did win the Nobel Prize for literature for her short stories – something very rare. This story, from the New Yorker’s 2003 fiction edition is a little longer than most of the fiction I link to here… but it is worth the time (as is anything Munro has written).
Bill Chance 