"Once people realized my glasses were full of tech, conversations often took a turn for the awkward — and they mostly unfolded the same way:"

"'Are you recording me?' (No, I’m not.) 'Where are the cameras?' (There aren’t any!) 'You’re really not recording me?' (No!)... Most of the time, people chose to take me at my word and the conversation continued (if a little icily.) Even in tech-heavy San Francisco, casual chats with people I have known for years sometimes turned tense after the glasses’ true nature were revealed. When asked, the most common reason people gave for why interactions took a turn for the awkward was a lingering concern that the glasses were listening anyway — even though they weren’t. The other big reason some people didn’t seem thrilled was a surprise: They thought I was ignoring them.... My wife still sometimes thinks I’m reading news headlines through the glasses even when I’m looking right at her.... [It's hard] to stay fully present with someone when a neon-green notification slides down in front of your eyes.... Some of these social issues may iron themselves out over time.... Until that happens, though, wearing smart glasses can make moving through the world feel a little socially graceless."

Writes Chris Velazco "I spent months living with smart glasses. People talk to me differently now. Eyeglasses are being augmented with screens, artificial intelligence and the power to unnerve people. We tested a pair to see how" (WaPo).

There's also this video. The most interesting part of that is Velazco's admission that his favorite use of the technology is to view inspirational messages that he has chosen for himself, such as: "You can do anything. You have what it takes. Just BELIEVE."

Imagine someone talking to you in person, looking in the direction of your eyes, but actually reading bullshit they've loaded into their glasses. May I suggest the inspirational message: Stay in the moment. Be spontaneous. The person in front of you might be a fully engaged HUMAN BEING!

"The major issue is that for many, many years, we’ve been utilizing an extractive model of tourism that says 'numbers at any cost.'"

"Now we are in a situation where all these kinds of things are being implemented, like restricting numbers and tourist taxes as reactive strategies.... I’m not sure there is a solution.... Unless it’s people taking responsibility and saying, 'You know what? I don’t need to see Venice. I’m not going to go.'"

Said Marina Novelli, the director of the Sustainable Travel and Tourism Advanced Research Center at the University of Nottingham, quoted in "Bans, Fees, Taxes. Can Anything Stop Overtourism? Efforts to limit visitors in tourist hot spots have had mixed results, at best. Competing interests have a way of impeding attempts to stem the tide" (NYT).

My idea is to work toward the old Yogi-ism: "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

From the comments over there: "The first times I visited Venice was 1963. The last time I visited Venice was in 2010. In 1963 It was possible to have your companion take a picture of you in front of Saint Marks feeding the pigeons with the cathedral in the background. In 2010 the pigeons had been replaced by people and I don't [think] it was possible to take a picture of anything."

The people-as-pigeons are people you won't want to rub elbows with. They are, as one says, nobodies.

Do birds have elbows?

"But I’m beginning to think students who don’t read are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them."

"In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort. For decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else. And the task of puzzling out an author’s argument will not prepare students to thrive in an economy that seems to run on vibes. Recent ads for Apple Intelligence, an A.I. feature, make the vision plain. In one, the actor Bella Ramsey uses artificial intelligence to cover for the fact they haven’t read the pitch their agent emailed. It works, and the project seems like a go. Is the project actually any good? It doesn’t matter. The vibes will provide...."

Writes Jonathan Malesic, in "There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore" (NYT).

I remember "vibes" as a hippie word, so I have trouble seeing how it functions these days in the speech of the young, and so, it annoys me. I wish I'd made a tag for it long ago, so I could could keep track of how it annoys me — at least in its usage by mainstream media. Do non-media young people go around saying it? I don't know. It just irks me when I see it in media.

For example... 

"That's the old saying — right? — if you're going to shoot at the king you better not miss."

Said the NYT White House correspondent Peter Baker on yesterday's episode of "The Daily." Context:

[Biden is] saying, in essence, you can't have this debate anymore because this debate, it undermines my chances exactly, and therefore I want you to shut up. This question is over. Knock it off move on. And I think he's daring them. He's daring his doubters and naysayers to come after him or to shut up. You want to take me on? Take me on. Right? That's the old saying — right? — if you're going to shoot at the king you better not miss. So all eyes right now are on Congressional Democrats to see where they fall this week. Do the floodgates open and they end up abandoning him in large numbers or do they decide to give up on that notion?

First, the "old saying" is in fact a famous quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "When you strike at a king, you must kill him." I wrote about it back in 2019:

Things maybe not said by Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King Jr.

I'd like to be more of a good sport about this column by Anne Lamott, "Age makes the miracles easier to see." But it begins with a quote and it ends with a quote ascribed to a monumental man and, in both cases, I don't think the man is the source of the quote.

Maybe if I were older, I'd "see" some essential truth in ascribing this to Albert Einstein...

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

... and this to Martin Luther King Jr....

"Don’t let them get you to hate them."

These lines sound less like something the man would say than like something that would get passed around on the internet by people who like what it says and extra-like it because of the grand name that got attached to it.

The Einstein "quote" is discussed at Skeptical Esoterica:

"He who doesn't work, doesn't eat.

Soviet poster issued in Uzbekistan, 1920.

From the Wikipedia article, "He who does not work, neither shall he eat," which I'm reading this morning because Wikipedia linked to it under "See also" at the bottom of its article "No such thing as a free lunch," which, you can see in the previous post, came up in the context of trying to understand the Russian word "khalyava."

I started this new post to show you that excellent propaganda artwork, and let me quote a bit from the "He who does not work" entry:

"In a recent memoir, the actor Matthew Perry, of 'Friends' reveals that his parents spent the hours before his birth playing the board game Monopoly."

"It was an unhappy marriage, Perry writes, and they divorced when he was a baby.... Most aficionados agree that Monopoly, if not a bad game, is at the very least designed to embitter its players.... But in... a new PBS documentary, we learn that... [t]he game... originally designed in 1903, by Lizzie Magie, a charismatic feminist, actor, and poet... Stephen Ives, [the] documentarian ...was once eager to introduce his children to Monopoly. 'It’s like the early Beatles or Disneyland or something....When are they going to be ready? What you don’t really realize is that you’re performing this ritualistic introduction to raw, unbridled American-style capitalism. You’re saying, "This is how society works. This is how you have fun, and crush other people."'... Games are systems, and... a shrewd designer can steer players toward a particular viewpoint through their experience of that system.... The game disguises luck as skill, misrepresents the American Dream, and promises wealth and power at the expense of others. Only in its final moments do we see the victor’s most enduring reward: isolation

Writes Simon Parkin in "How Monopoly Became America’s Cruellest Board Game/In 'Ruthless: The Secret History of Monopoly,' we learn how a game meant to critique capitalism came to embody it" (The New Yorker).

Even as the "shrewd designer can steer players toward a particular viewpoint," the shrewd documentarian will steer viewers toward a particular viewpoint.

"Buckminster Fuller... was an American type—self-invented, overflowing with ideas and theories, eager to see the universe whole, and born to evangelize...."

"On his lecture tours he could speak for hours without stopping, and he mesmerized his audiences even as he baffled them. 'Students find themselves tuned in to the unique Fuller wave length, with its oddly necessary word coinings and its synergetic constructions,' Calvin Tomkins wrote in an adulatory 1966 profile in The New Yorker. In print—and Fuller’s books are mainly edited versions of his lectures—his prose is a word salad, the same phrases and catchwords combined and recombined until the mind reels. 'Physical points are energy-event aggregations,' he would say. 'When they converge beyond the critical fall-in proximity threshold, they orbit coordinatedly, as a Universe-precessed aggregate, as loose pebbles on our Earth orbit the Sun in unison, and as chips ride around on men’s shoulders.'..."

From "Space-Age Magus/From beginning to end, experts saw through Buckminster Fuller’s ideas and theories. Why did so many people come under his spell?" by James Gleick (NYRB).

"He believed in a coming utopia. He thought no one should have to work merely to earn a living. He had a gift for slogans: 'God is a verb.' 'Nature never fails.' 'Either war is obsolete, or men are.' 'Universe is eternally regenerative.' One young listener said, 'When I listen to Bucky talk, I feel I’ve got to go out and save the world. Then when I go outside, I realize I don’t know how.'...  Even Stewart Brand has come to regret touting Fuller in the Whole Earth Catalog. 'Domes couldn’t grow or adapt,' he says. 'When my generation outgrew the domes, we simply left them empty, like hatchlings leaving their eggshells.'”

Know thyself?

That's a cute little BBC animation that I found after that Bret Stephens column — blogged here — made me think about the old aphorism "Know thyself." Stephens was talking about the "self-satisfied elite" who didn't understand the point of view of the non-elite. It made me think: How dare these people regard themselves as elite if they are self-satisfied? They are not educated if they haven't looked into the functioning of their own mind, especially if they satisfy themselves with contempt for others.

Here's Wikipedia on "Know thyself":

The Ancient Greek aphorism "know thyself" (Greek: γνῶθι σεαυτόν, transliterated: gnōthi seauton...) is the first of three Delphic maxims inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.... The two maxims that follow "know thyself" were "nothing to excess" and "certainty brings insanity." In Latin the phrase, "know thyself", is given as nosce te ipsum or temet nosce.

"Certainty brings insanity" is the least well-known of those aphorisms. It explains a lot!

Much more at that Wikipedia link, but — here — I'll just show  you this cool painting from the 1600s, inscribed with the Latin phrase:

"Unlike nouns and pronouns, verbs don’t have 'proverbs' to pick up the pace, although we cheat a little with sentences such as, 'Susan drank wine and Mary did, too.'"

"Verbs are grammatically more complex than nouns but have less to reveal. When you’re about to say a verb, you’re less likely to be saying something new, so your brain doesn’t have to slow down what it’s already doing to plan for it."

From "Why Nouns Slow Us Down, and Why Linguistics Might Be in a Bubble" (The New Yorker).

(The title refers to a study that found that in 9 different languages, "the speech immediately preceding a noun is three-and-a-half-per-cent slower than the speech preceding a verb. And in eight of nine languages, the speaker was about twice as likely to introduce a pause before a noun than before a verb....")

Of course, "proverb" is a word. It's just not a word that parallels "pronoun."

That article came out in 2018, before the current obsession with pronouns. These days we ask, What are your pronouns? But it would be more interesting to know: What are your proverbs?

Mine are: Nothing ventured nothing gained and Truth is stranger than fiction.

"Pleasure is to women what the sun is to the flower; if moderately enjoyed, it beautifies, it refreshes, and it improves; if immoderately, it withers, etiolates, and destroys."

Wrote Charles Caleb Colton in "Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words : Addressed to Those who Think," in 1820:

That's quoted at the OED definition for "etiolate,"  which means "To lessen or undermine the strength, vigour, or effectiveness of (a quality, group, movement, etc.); to have a weakening effect upon." 

That's the second meaning. The oldest meaning is about plants: "To cause (a plant) to develop with reduced levels of chlorophyll (esp. by restricting light), causing bleaching of the green tissues, elongated internodes, weakened stems, deficiencies in vascular structure, and abnormally small leaves."

You take the plant out of the sun to etiolate it, but the woman needs to be kept out of the sun, lest she etiolate. So said Colton, anyway. He was one of the "boys" referenced in the more recent aphorism: "Some boys take a beautiful girl and hide her away from the rest of the world/I want to be the one to walk in the sun...." The sun, Colton. 

But C.C. Colton is long gone. He died in 1832 — forever excluded from the sun — died of suicide, committed because, we're told, he had an illness that required surgery, and he dreaded surgery.

I'm reading about the word "etiolated" because I used it yesterday: "I'm collecting examples of this avoidance of the word 'woman' and the resultant etiolation of speech."

"Asked"?! That's putting it mildly.

I'm reading "Here’s a Fact: We’re Routinely Asked to Use Leftist Fictions" by John McWhorter (in the NYT).

"[W]e think of it as ordinary to not give voice to our questions about things that clearly merit them, terrified by the response that objectors often receive. History teaches us that this is never a good thing."

McWhorter is underplaying the problem. We don't just think it's ordinary to refrain from saying certain things (such as, to name the example he stresses, the existence of race-preferences in higher education admissions). We think it's abnormal to the point of toxicity not to refrain.

We (as a culture) are deeply engaged in teaching young people that they must lie. The "white lie" is no longer merely permissible. It's required.  I wonder if young people have retained any of the old-fashioned commitment to truth. It's obviously not the highest value anymore.

I was surprised to run across this aphorism on Facebook the other day: "That Which Can Be Destroyed By the Truth Should Be." There were lots of comments celebrating this abstraction. I considered delivering truth that would destroy their bullshit celebration of a principle I doubt they believe. 

But I refrained. I consider my reputation as a nice (enough) person on Facebook to be worth preserving. But I didn't believe the aphorism. I just had a mischievous urge to show them their admiration of it was itself a lie. But such urges are better confined to this blog, where no one runs into me by accident. 

Anyway, whose aphorism is that? Quote Investigator has done the research, here. The answer is not Carl Sagan.

"Instead of trying to carpet the world, put on slippers."

Said a commenter, at WaPo, on an "Ask Amy" column about a letter from a woman who wanted another woman's husband to stop talking so much and so obnoxiously on Facebook. 

The larger issue is the way people expect the wife to control her husband and think it's a wife's job to be an intermediary on their behalf. It's always the woman's job to tend to social harmony. A secondary issue is that people who are unhappy with interactions occurring on Facebook don't seem to realize you can just click a button — "snooze" or "unfollow" — and you don't have to see that person anymore. 

But the line "Instead of trying to carpet the world, put on slippers" was so good, I figured it's unlikely to be original with that commenter. Google gives over 9 million hits, rephrases it — "It's easier to put on slippers than to carpet the whole world" — and attributes it to...

Al Franken!

I see there's a discussion of the Al Franken adage at a subreddit devoted to... Jordan Peterson.

The Redditor also quotes what purports to be the writing of some unknown person in the year 1100... though it sounds like something somebody wrote yesterday... and therefore I'm not going to quote it here. It's not good enough. It's like something somebody I'd like to snooze would put on Facebook. 

Also at that link is a quote that's quite similar to the wisdom attributed to Franken: "To walk the Earth without cutting your feet, it is easier to cover your soles in leather than to cover the world." 

Is that authentic ancient wisdom or recent old-time-i-ness? It gets over 30 million hits on Google, but that just means it's been repeated more often. And the Franken quote is better, because you can visualize carpeting the world, not that you could actually do it. It's a good, vivid image and the point is made, but it's awkward to picture covering the world in leather. On the other hand, you can go walking out in the world in leather shoes, but if you're only wearing slippers, you kind of need to stay home. 

I say kind of, because there are a few people who've gone out and about in slippers, notably Vincent Gigante. And I once saw a lady try a case in federal court in slippers. Pro se.

What if they gave a riot and nobody came?

I'm seeing this in the NYT:

Fewer than 100 right-wing demonstrators, sharply outnumbered by an overwhelming police presence and even by reporters, gathered at the foot of the Capitol on Saturday to denounce what they called the mistreatment of “political prisoners” who had stormed the building on Jan. 6.

It was, we're told, "peaceful." Maybe it wouldn't have been so small and so peaceful if only the government hadn't prepared so well:

Where only movable metal barriers stood between a mob and the Capitol on Jan. 6, layers of newly erected fence and dump trucks lined end to end guarded the building. Mounted police, absent eight months ago, now stood at the ready. Riot shields were stacked at Capitol entrances, and law enforcement from the capital region, including the Virginia State Police and the police departments for Fairfax County in Virginia and Prince George’s County in Maryland, arrived with armored cars. One hundred National Guard troops from the District of Columbia were also on alert. 

Was that ridiculous or a demonstration of why they say "If you want peace, prepare for war." 

My post title is a variation on another old saying: "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" 

I went down a rathole looking for the source of that saying, which I just remember from common speech in the late 60s/early 70s. I won't bore you with the arguments that it originated with Allen Ginsberg, Bertolt Brecht, or Carl Sandburg. I'll just say that the attribution to Brecht is the most scurrilous — written in German, mistranslated. And the Sandburg reference is the oldest, though not verbatim: "Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come."

"The specifically English hatred of patriotism has long been kept alive by its intellectual classes, the people who, as George Orwell wrote, 'would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save the King than of stealing from a poor box.'"

"Because England was not the creation of intellectuals, patriotism has never been an intellectual pastime. The ecstasies of 19th-century Romantic nationalism which gave birth to Germany and Italy were forged by poets, musicians and the re-assemblers of lost national epics and folk traditions. By this time England had been muddling along for a millennium. Unlike nations ushered into being by Enlightenment intellectuals which enshrined philosophical abstractions as national principles ('liberty, equality and fraternity' for Republican France, 'freedom' for the United States), British patriotism comes from below. Accordingly it is usually defined in hilariously prosaic terms: queueing, warm beer, roast beef, rain. These are all things disliked by intellectuals.... Our long tradition of national self-hatred has in some ways stress-tested the national consciousness. Self-hatred doesn’t portend a 'chasm.' It is something we are long-sufferingly accustomed to. Things are more dangerous in brittler, prouder America." 

From "It’s deeply British to question our patriotism/A tradition of tolerating dissent is a sign of national strength rather than something to fret over" by James Marriott (London Times).

We're brittler than Brits, he says. And prouder. He sounds proud, you might say, but not proud of his country, and that's his point about pride.

I do think our intellectuals look down on patriotism too, though less amusingly. There's a lot of expression of patriotism in America because most of us don't take our cues from intellectuals. I'm sure at least half of my readers are, right now, rankling at my acceptance of Marriott's word "intellectuals" to refer to America's present-day elite.

The top-rated comment at the London Times quotes James Boswell’s "Life of Johnson" (entry dated April 7, 1775):

Patriotism having become one of our topicks, Johnson suddenly uttered, in a strong determined tone, an apothegm, at which many will start: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” But let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest.

"'What happens to us while we are making other plans,' per Allen Saunders" — what?!

So... that's from today's mini crossword in the NYT, and I and — I guess — a million mini-puzzlers are saying who the hell is Allen Saunders and how have I gone so long attributing this witticism to John Lennon?

 

Wikipedia says: 

Allen Saunders (April 24, 1899 – January 28, 1986)[2] was an American writer, journalist and cartoonist who wrote the comic strips Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, Mary Worth and Kerry Drake. 

He is credited with being the originator of the saying, "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans" [published in Reader's Digest] in 1957. The saying was later slightly modified and popularised by John Lennon in the song "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)".

Mary Worth! Is there anything less John-Lennon-like than Mary Worth?

Dan Rather is afoot.

"Patriotism is rooted in humility. Nationalism is rooted in arrogance."
- Dan Rather, "What Unites Us" (2020) https://t.co/tILhFUtYj4

— Donald R. Koelper (@Donald_from_HI) October 5, 2020

Seen because the name Dan Rather is trending on Twitter this morning. He seems to have a new book.

Do you like that aphorism? "Patriotism is rooted in humility. Nationalism is rooted in arrogance."

Patriotism is rooted in _________________.

How would you fill in that blank? Pick your favorite from my list and discuss other options in the comments.

humility

pride

love

shared interest

shared delusion

history

white supremacy

familiarity/proximity

sentimentality/convention

 

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: Let's also use a survey to examine the other half of the aphorism:

Nationalism is rooted in _______________.

arrogance

love

fear or hatred of outsiders

feelings of racial supremacy

the charisma of a leader

self-interest/self-protection

history

patriotism

 

pollcode.com free polls

AND: As long as we're doing surveys...

Dan Rather is rooted in _____________.

journalism

love

hostility

depleted soil

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Silence Is Made In America" (a found slogan).

You may have to click twice to enlarge and see the plywood stamp "Made in America." Oh, let me help:



Here's the full image, with the intended slogan ("Silence Is Violence"):



Here's the Wikipedia article "Found Poetry" (which I'm choosing over "Found object" because we're talking about words):

Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them (a literary equivalent of a collage) by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. The resulting poem can be defined as either treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the poem.

I invite you to reflect on the meaning of the phrase no human mind intended to say, but that I saw and regarded as worth reflecting upon: "Silence Is Made In America." It's not something I am happy about, this American product, Silence. It is not one of the world's most beloved brands.

Here's a statement about silence that was made with intention: "Silence is death, and you, if you talk, you die, and if you remain silent, you die. So, speak out and die." That was said by the Algerian journalist and writer Tahar Djaout (who was assassinated).

ADDED: Is "silence"/"violence" a good rhyme? Dylan used it:

My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence

"Anti-trans revanchists have centered their battles in wordplay — if you can call it that. J.K. Rowling, in a recent tweet..."

"... noted that 'people who menstruate' were once referred to as 'Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?' (She meant 'women.' There’s that wordplay.) She also argued, 'If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased' and 'erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives.' Ms. Rowling’s linguistic wizardry cloaks her political goal, to assign gender purely by sex, and therefore relegate trans-ness to a closet under the stairs. It should be noted that trans people do not generally believe sex is not real; indeed, discomfort with the sex of our bodies is a frequent challenge for trans people. Ms. Rowling knows this, since she knows what the word 'trans' means. Words hold power, and it’s no surprise that pushback to a rising trans presence has come in the form of definitional conservatism. But the battle extends beyond language, and Ms. Rowling’s semantic battle has been taken to new theaters by the Trump administration. From our schools to our hospitals to the federal work force, the administration has pursued new rules that define trans people out of existence. This is an attack on trans lives. As with Ms. Rowling, the language of the proposed rules is the language of bodies: the social roles of 'man' and 'woman' are the only two available, and we are all assigned one at birth according to our bodies..... When you use words like 'male' as shorthand for those privileged by the patriarchy, you leave trans women uncertain whether you have our backs or — like the Trump administration and J.K. Rowling — you are trying to write us out of existence. It’s impossible to dismantle the patriarchy while wearing a 'pussy hat.'"

Writes Devin Michelle Bunten, who is an assistant professor of urban economics and housing at M.I.T. in "Sex Does Not Mean Gender. Equating Them Erases Trans Lives/Embracing the experiences of trans people means leaving old vocabularies behind" (NYT).

I had some trouble understanding the aphorism "It’s impossible to dismantle the patriarchy while wearing a 'pussy hat.'" But I think I get it now, so let me help you with it.

The idea is to get people to think in terms of gender and not sex, with "sex" understood to refer only to the physical body — notably, the genitalia. A pussy hat represents and flaunts female genitalia and therefore intensifies the conflation of sex and gender. The way to make progress — "to dismantle the patriarchy" — is to clarify the distinction between sex and gender and to stress the importance — in our social roles — of gender.

Down on State Street here in Madison, every ground floor window is covered in plywood, and there's an effort to turn it into something good by painting murals.

A small procession...



"Silence is complicity"...



"Silence is violence"...



That's at the art museum, but the award for the best painting goes to...



Walking with coffee...



Controlling the narrative...



The iconic Triangle Market...



And the beloved Paul's Books...



Nonsense... this was on the credit union...



"Inclusion" — It's Sugar....



"UNITY"...



Imagine not leaving Ragstock alone!



Background: "For three nights, business[es] on and around State Street in Downtown Madison have been sitting ducks for those who have taken advantage of the uproar over the killing of George Floyd to vandalize and steal their property. Almost every business on the street, from new ventures to those that have been around for decades, has been hit by graffiti, broken windows or looting. Above most of these properties are apartments occupied by residents, many of them terrified of what the nightly raids might bring. While the owners are weary of the damage, support for the cause behind the protests is nearly unanimous" (Wisconsin State Journal, with interviews with shopowners).