parsing Jimmy

I've lately started a collection of notices posted by Jimmy, the front desk manager in my building. They are usually short, apparently simple messages, but like a great haiku, they reveal untold layers of meaning as you ponder them more deeply. Most of these layers seem to concern what a bunch of clueless slobs we residents are. For example, here is today's announcement concerning bagels:

SUNDAY BREAKFAST AT PLYMOUTH

BREAKFAST WILL BE SERVED AT THE PLYMOUTH ON SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4TH AT 10:30 AM. THERE WILL BE COFFEE, BAGELS AND CREAM CHEESE. ALL FELLOWS ARE INVITED. EACH PERSON WILL SERVE HIMSELF. THIS BREAKFAST IS BEING PURCHASED FROM EISENSTEIN'S. ALL OF YOU FELLOWS COME AND ENJOY.

PROVIDED BY NORMAN LITZ/LINCOLN HALL

The all-caps is a trademark of Jimmy's style; it seems to proclaim, "I'M ONLY GOING TO SAY THIS ONCE. THEN I'M GOING TO STICK ONE ON EVERY DOOR IN THE BUILDING." The key line, to me, is the one right in the center: "EACH PERSON WILL SERVE HIMSELF". Is this hearkening back to a time when the Plymouth may have had a wait staff and white tablecloths? Does he worry that we might all just sit there, staring at all that coffee, those bagels, that cream cheese, wondering who will come to serve us? Or might the whole gathering descend into chaos, rioting, and violence as fellows try to choose bagels for one another?

Maybe I am stretching when I sense a tinge of contempt in that imperative "ALL OF YOU COME AND ENJOY." The miracle of these things, though, is that you can find so many different meanings in them. I haven't even touched on the enigmatic transformation of Einstein Bros. into "EISENSTEIN'S". For some mysteries, each reader may be best advised to SERVE HIMSELF.

Here is another recent announcement:

ELECTRICAL POWER

WHEN YOU USE THE A/C, PLEASE MAKE SURE THAT YOUR WINDOWS ARE CLOSED. IF THE WINDOWS ARE KEPT OPENED, WHEN YOU USE THE A/C, THIS WILL CAUSE THE ELECTRICAL BILL TO BE TOO HIGH. PLEASE, WHEN YOU USE YOU'RE A/C, BE SURE THAT ALL OF YOUR WINDOWS ARE CLOSED.

Artists in all forms have recognized the power of repetition, but few can match the sense of sheer desperation conveyed in these three sentences. The quiet resolve of the first line becomes a little breathless in the second, culminating in that climactic "PLEASE," and the final invocation. Again, there is a mysterious "typo" which seems only to heighten the power of that last, plaintive phrase.

fallible gods

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

-Jorge Luis Borges

I'm not sure whether it was actual grief or just all the sand, sweat, and sunscreen that had gotten into my eyes - I had never gotten this emotional over topsoil erosion before. But tears were streaming down my face as I jogged up South Beach yesterday morning. Where there had been a thick layer of perfectly manicured beach sand was now just a patchily exposed cement surface. Most of the sand had blown off into the ocean with Hurricane Katrina.

topsoil-less: Miami's denuded beach

It was hardly the storm's most disastrous effect, but it does seem like the most convenient metaphor for this last week of disaster and disappointment: all pretenses and artifice stripped bare, leaving only the sad, ugly truth. Miami Beach, like New Orleans and so many other places, exists more as a product of the human imagination than any natural geological processes - and our inspired tinkering with nature tends to leave us all the more vulnerable to nature's impacts. A pristine, sandy beach seems much lovelier than the scrubby, untamed wilderness that preceded it; just as New Orleans is much nicer behind those levees than in its native, swampy state. The farther we get from reality, though, the more susceptible we become to these harsh reminders.

It seems that this is what we humans do: we take something humble, homely and real and we strive to build something that is huge, fake and beautiful, not foreseeing the wasteland that will result when it crumbles. As in that Jorge Luis Borges quote about love, we build our hopes on foundations which are just as fallible as we are ourselves.

While New Orleans may take years to reassemble, I'm sure that Miami Beach will be lustrously beautifully again in time for the fall tourist season. Only a few of us foolish late-summer residents will remember the ugly landscape that a hurricane exposed.

I'm not always this depressed; please read a more cheerful post about South Beach. I'd also recommend Nicholas Lemann's "In the Ruins," an insightful essay on New Orleans.

Las Vegas' mountains over a man-made lake 

disaster and politics

Reading the news these past few days has been an exercise in compassionate helplessness, and the crisis in New Orleans only seems to be getting worse. I was visiting my Mom and step-dad Barry yesterday, and watching the emotionally wrought anchorwoman on CNN, I found myself saying, "This is almost worse than 9/11." Maybe that will seem like ridiculous exaggeration in another few weeks, but right now the scale of this tragedy is difficult to fathom.

I hate to indulge in what has become a sort of knee-jerk response, and blame this all on the Bush administration - disasters like this inevitably happen, Iraq didn't cause Katrina - still, the vast majority of deaths and suffering come in the aftermath of the storm, and depend critically on the federal government's response. There seems to be a pattern in the Bush approach to problem-solving - wishful thinking, ignored warnings, lack of preparation, followed by a lot of rhetorical posturing and very few substantive solutions. The news coverage of chaos on the streets of New Orleans, juxtaposed against similar horrors in Baghdad, suggests a common lack of sensible policies, and a pressing need for more effective leadership.

downtown Tacoma, with Mt. Rainier in the background

Collapse and new college football nicknames

The college football season is upon us, which is not that exciting in itself. Now that the NCAA governing council has announced guidelines restricting the use of Native American-inspired nicknames, though, I have a newfound sense of anticipation. I'm hoping that some of the schools will take the example of the USC Trojans and adopt the names of failed or destroyed civilizations, such as those described in Jared Diamond's extraordinary Collapse: How societies choose to fail or to succeed. These names might help to promulgate sociological and ecological awareness among college football fans. Everyone knows how the Trojans fought valiantly before being tricked and brutally slaughtered; but if these schools take my suggestions, several less well-known but equally unfortunate societies will get their rightful recognition as well!

Mississippi State Mangarevans

With too many people and too little food, Mangareva society slid into a nightmare of civil war and chronic hunger, whose consequences are recalled in detail by modern islanders. For protein, people turned to cannibalism, in the form not only of eating freshly dead people but also of digging up and eating buried corpses. Chronic fighting broke out over the precious remaining cultivable land; the winning side redistributed the land of the losers. Instead of an orderly political system based on hereditary chiefs, non-hereditary warriors took over. The thought of Lilliputian military dictatorships on eastern and western Mangareva, battling for control of an island only five miles long, could seem funny if it were not so tragic. — Collapse, p. 132

If those Lilliputian military dictatorships were battling for control of a hundred yards of gridiron, though, it might make for some smash-mouth football!

San Diego State Dorsets

Each of us can imagine our own scenario for the end of Dorset culture. One guess of mine is that, among groups of Dorset people starving in a difficult winter, the women just deserted their men and walked over to Inuit camps where they knew that people were feasting on bowhead whales and ringed seals. — p. 260

Sort of like the wives and girlfriends of dedicated Dorset football fans!

Florida State Easter Islanders

We know of not more than a hundred pukao [tall cylindrical monuments], reserved for statues on the biggest and richest ahu [enormous stone platforms] built late in Easter prehistory. I cannot resist the thought that they were produced as a show of one-upmanship. They seem to proclaim: “All right, so you can erect a statue 30 feet high, but look at me: I can put this 12-ton pukao on top of my statue; you try to top that, you wimp!” — p. 98

Tallahassee may be nowhere near the South Pacific, but those huge heads would look great on a football helmet!

Virginia Tech Vinlanders

According to the sagas, the first Indians that the Vikings met were a group of nine, of whom they killed eight, while the ninth fled. That was not a promising start to establishing friendship. — p. 209

'Skraelings,' the Old Norse word that the Norse applied to all three groups of New World natives that they encountered in Vinland or Greenland (Inuit, Dorset, and Indians), translates approximately as 'wretches.' It also bodes poorly for peaceful relations if you take the first Inuit or Dorset person whom you see, and you try stabbing him as an experiment to figure out how much he bleeds.... These first contacts go a long way towards explaining why the Norse did not establish a good trading relationship with the Inuit. — p. 261

The Vinlanders might have poor trading relations, but they'd do a great job of recruiting sadistic teenaged linebackers!

Of course, Collapse discusses several more successful societies which also deserve recognition as college football mascots. Here are a couple of those:

Texas Tikopians

Tikopia chiefs each year carry out a ritual in which they preach an ideal of Zero Population Growth for the island, unaware that an organization founded with that name (but subsequently renamed) and devoted to that goal has also arisen in the First World... Much commoner than...explicit suicide was “virtual suicide” by setting out on dangerous overseas voyages... For instance, [anthropologist Raymond] Firth learned in 1929 that a Tikopian man named Pa Nukumara, the younger brother of a chief still alive then, had gone to sea with two of his own sons during a severe drought and famine, with the express intent of dying quickly, instead of slowly starving to death on shore. — p. 290-291

If they could get a few guys like Pa Nukumara on special teams, the Tikopians would have it made!

Navy New Guineans

New Guineans are more curious and experimental than any other people that I have encountered. When in my early years in New Guinea I saw someone who had acquired a pencil, which was still an unfamiliar object then, the pencil would be tried out for myriad purposes other than writing: a hair decoration? a stabbing tool? something to chew on? a long earring? a plug through the pierced nasal septum? — p. 285

The New Guineans' ingenuity will surely inspire some new football plays, as well as new ear and nasal decorations, not to mention stabbing tools!

Jared Diamond's book demonstrates how our civilization is threatened on many sides, like a quarterback facing an all-out blitz: environmental mismanagement, lack of cooperation, overpopulation, climate change, and hostile relations all threaten to sack us deep in a backfield of catastrophe and suffering. If we want to draw up a playbook to avoid this outcome, we don't necessarily need a bunch of 300-lb. linemen, but we will need all the innovation of a pencil-chewing New Guinean, and all the proactive solutions that we can set in motion.

morbid noises in a lovely room

my Dad and step-mom's conservatory in Lakewood, Wa.

I've just been practicing in this beautiful little glass room at my Dad and step-mom Theresa's house. While I am here visiting, a friend of Dad's named Bob was nice enough to loan me his bass, on the condition that we replaced its snapped G-string. Dad, Bob, and another friend named Mike meet regularly to jam in what they call their "hootenannies".

As nice as it is to have a bass to play, it's sort of wretched to listen to. We went to Hammond Ashley yesterday and got a nice Helicore G-string - the problem now is the big, dead gut D-string next to it, which produces a sound something like a small rodent being strangled to death. So my rendition of the 'Arpeggione' sonata suggests a melancholy baritone, lamenting his unhappiness while violently asphyxiating a squirrel. The view of the golf course is very pleasant, though.