Summer Reading 2011

Taking a cue from my virtual friend Mixtapes and Cupcakes, I thought I might do a post about summer reading (now that the weather and the calendar seem to have finally come to a consensus.)  Specifically, I thought I would post a bit about what I shall be reading this summer, followed by a short list of summer reading recommendations for hypothetical people who are interested in such things.

The books pictured above are my own summer reading, not what I am suggesting for others specifically.  Although it's always nice to have people read along with me, I won't suggest things I haven't finished reading yet.

Of course, I forge ahead with the Harvard Classics Library.  The current volume turns its attention to early Christian writings.  I am currently reading The Confessions of Saint Augustine and next up I have The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis.  The next volume of the Harvard Classics looks like this:

VIII. Agamemnon, The Libation-Bearers, The Furies and Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus
Oedipus the King and Antigone of Sophocles
Hippolytus and The Bacchæ of Euripides
The Frogs of Aristophanes

I may skip Oedipus as I read it about a year ago.  The non-Harvard Classics title which I plan to read this summer is The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  My father recommended it to me on the phone the other day and, as fortune would have it, it had already been sitting on my "to read" pile for a few months.  So, it is my intention to get to it this summer, possibly over our vacation (although it looks like our vacation calendar is rapidly filling with Shakespeare, art museums, and meals with loved ones.  I'm not sure how much reading I'll get done on our trip.)  Realistically, this will most likely take me up to the time of year when the college students are coming back into town, so that is my summer reading list.

I am given to understand that the concept behind "Summer Reading" is similar to the concept of summer dining.  One doesn't take sauerkraut and sausage to a light, white wine and salad beach party and, I would dare to speculate, not a whole lot of people sunbathing down the California coast are going to be laying out on the towel with The Gulag Archipelago.  I am not sure the list above is a Summer Reading list so much as the books I happen to be reading in the season of summer this year.  So, I thought I might make a short list of suggestions for those who are interested in a suggested Summer Reading list.  Here is something light, something dark, something modern, an abyss of a book, and a poetry selection.

The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology - I think P.G. Wodehouse is the very picture of summer reading: light, smart, compelling, and highly entertaining.  He may be most famous for his Jeeves character and I would say rightly so.  I recommend Wodehouse to anyone and this is a good starting point.

Murder of Angels  - Long time readers of this blog know that I've been beating the Caitlin R. Kiernan drum for many years (probably close to a decade now.)  I still think she is one of the best contemporary authors.  Murder of Angels is, in my opinion, her best work and a great place to start.  I do need to state that her work is exceedingly dark, so please do be prepared for that.  But it is a rip-roaring good summer book for those who like books that grab them by the throat.  I would also add that Amazon seems to currently have this title on extreme sale, so this would be a good time to get it.  Let me say in no uncertain terms, it is a wonderful book.

Nightwood (New Edition)  - Nightwood is one of those books that sticks in my mind long after I've read it, turning it over and over like a stone in my hand that I got from a creek-bed.  It is a dreamlike, modernist narrative.  The language is luscious and heady.   I was first turned onto the book by this article by Siri Hustvedt in which she recalls her strange history with the book and interaction with the author.  I was especially grabbed by the description of copious underlinings and margin notes and, indeed, I found it to be a book, although only about 200 pages, in which one can swim for months.  Highly, highly recommended.  One of the grossly underrated modern masterpieces.

House of Leaves - And speaking of modern masterpieces in which one can swim for months, House of Leaves is one of those books which transforms the reader.  The narrative within starts to seep into the life of the reader and lines between fiction and reality get a little blurry.  I do not exaggerate to say that it is one of the best books of the past 20 years and that everyone should read it.  It also happens to be a rollicking good read.

Letters to Guns - Brendan Constantine is a friend of mine, but I include this selection in this list because he is also one of the best contemporary American poets.  And I'm just going to cut and paste the Amazon product description for this book:

Letters To Guns represents a collection of poems that examine the para-physical natures of love and history, at times re-imagining both. As the poems progress, eight letters arrive written by non-human addressees (a nightgown, a grove of trees, a wooden spoon, others) at random points over the last 2,200 years. They are messages from home and pleas for understanding, warnings and promises of change. These in turn ignite other poems and themes which anticipate the next arrival. Taken together, the letters form an armature, a living skeleton fleshed by real and metaphenomenal experience. Throughout, a variety of styles appear and no single approach to poetry pervades. Singly, these poems should challenge and entertain. As a group they must transform and evolve our experience of sitting down with a book of poems.

So, that should give some of you a lovely summer's worth of reading.  Good Summer to you and happy reading.

Ta!

Podcast Roundup

I have a long, daily commute, so I work on getting as many regular podcasts as possible.  Occasionally I list the latest finds and post them here in case someone out there might like them too.

The Thrilling Adventure Hour- This is quite simply one of the best podcasts available right now.  No matter what other podcast uploads, if there is a new TAH, I bump it to the top of my playlist.  They are recorded live and they are shows in the style of old timey radio shows.  They are hilarious, but they are also incredibly well written.  Some of the best are Sparks Nevada, which mashes up westerns and space, and Beyond Belief, which is about a society page couple who have adventures in the paranormal.  I cannot recommend this show highly enough.  It is hilarious and gloriously clever.

Stuff You Should Know- I am really late to this party.  They've been doing this podcast for years and I've only just now discovered it.  Which provides me with a trove of 300 some past episodes to listen to!  This is a show where two guys explain a subject for laypeople.  The topics tend toward the sort of idle questions that impress people if you have an answer ready at hand (some recents: do you stay conscious after decapitation? What is parkour? What is molecular gastronomy? How do people get drawn into cults?)  I am regularly surprised by how often the information covered in their podcasts come up in the course of my daily life.  Truly no knowledge is useless.  It is also a bit on the informal side which aids in digestion and, ideally, inspires more in-depth exploration on the information raised.

And then I learned that there is a whole Stuff You Should Know world of podcasts.  One of the better, along with the original, is Stuff To Blow Your Mind.  The distinction seems to be more of an exclusively science focused podcast.  There is also Stuff You Missed in History which I like, but they tend to be short.  I avoid short podcasts on my commute because it requires pushing buttons while driving.  25-60 minutes are what I look for.  There is also Stuff Your Mom Never Told You which I have next on my queue and Tech Stuff.  There may be others.

Motley Fool Money-  This podcast is four guys, one imagines sitting around a table, speaking excitedly about a topic.  One sees this format of show with sports or politics.  In this case, it is the week's business news and the state of specific stocks.  They have a section in the middle in which they interview someone, usually someone with a book coming out.  The Achilles Heel of this podcast is a very short shelf life (it comes out Friday and, I would imagine, is dated by 8:05 am Monday morning), so I listen to it as soon as it comes out.  I would also add that while they are not purposely difficult in their terminology, they don't tend to slow down to explain concepts so one is called upon to keep in mentally.  The effect is a bit like a morning jog.  They are transparent enough to tell you up front that people on the show may have a vested interest in some of the stocks mentioned.  But really, aside from publicly funded news sources that don't rely on advertisers, that is no different from any other news source save for the honesty.

NPR's Planet Money-  Another business news podcast which does take some pains to put the cookies on a lower shelf and, for example, explain the IMF in terms that someone who has only just heard of such a thing can understand.  I want to emphasize my conviction that this is something sorely needed in modern journalism.  So often I meet, for example, someone who claims to hate the Federal Reserve because their favorite television or radio entertainment show told them to, but then gets spotty when pressed to explain exactly what the Federal Reserve actually does.  However, I would hasten to add that this podcast is not simply a sixth-grade economics refresher course.  It very much attempts to explain the current global business climate and, albeit very conservatively, to forecast a bit.

Enjoy.

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

Every Bally Poem by Robert Burns

I have to start by saying I feel like I have made it over one hump in this project.  A quick look back at the list of Harvard Classics shows me that while there are still volumes of poetry to come, this is the last in the series that compiles every poem ever written by a single poet.  I have two theses on this volume to make right up front: 1) I enjoyed the work of Robert Burns immensely however 2) I strongly feel that poems are not meant to be read in this manner (looking over at my bookshelf, I'm suddenly acutely aware that I will probably never take down Allen Ginsberg's White Shroud or Cosmopolitan Greetings again except to move.  Why do I even own these aside from the latter being autographed?  Who reads White Shroud and why?), although I'm partly to blame for that.  In the interest of moving this project along, I sat down in long stretches and read the book like a novel.  I think it is generally wiser and more helpful to read a poem or two each day rather than 45 pages of one page poems in a sitting.  It put me in mind of Truman Capote's assessment of Venice which he said was "like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.”"

The poems of Burns are, or at least were (the much poorer we), deeply ingrained in Western Civilization.  Like Shakespeare and Milton, a lot of the phrases we say on a daily basis came from his pen.  I share Dr. Eliot's feeling that Burns was one of the greatest poets in the English language.  His mastery of composition makes it seem easy and conversational.  I was always amazed and delighted to come across a great, classic poem in this volume of course (what with all of the loves being like red red roses, auld acquaintances getting overlooked, and all of those murine and homonid plans going agley) but I found that I was equally interested in the vast eccentricities included therein.

A good share of Burns' work are songs, generally rewriting lyrics to existing songs, none of which I had ever heard of before (so the titles read along the lines of "Nancy's the Cutie o' the Glen- to the tune of 'There's a Wee Clootie in a But an' Ben.'"  P.S. Not an actual Burns title.  It's a composite.  Like New York magazine does.)  So it's kind of like reading the lyrics to a new Weird Al album when you're past the age of knowing all popular music.  Except to the lyrical content of Burns I would employ the adjective "clever" rather than "novelty."  

He also wrote a lot of mean-spirited epitaphs for people he didn't like.  It would take an extraordinarily charming human to prevent this from being the very pinnacle of déclassé.  Burns is almost that charming.

The most inscrutable pieces, which left me clamoring for an editor, are the pieces which comment on long forgotten "current events."  I know enough from my travels in Great Britain and my vast library of Sir Harry Lauder recordings to make sense of Burns' often thick dialectical writing.  I know enough of history to hirple along with him when he brings up Wallace or Charles James Fox.  But even living in the golden age of the internet was no help when he starts naming a provincial minister who held some unpopular point of doctrine.

My knowledge of Burns' biography lacks coordination, I'm afraid, and the introductory note gives the briefest of flyovers.  I do know that he was censured by the Kirk-session for an unwedlocked intimacy with a young lady.  I sensed a somewhat jaded view of religion in Burns although I did not sense a falling away from faith, which served to draw me closer to Burns.

I think I like Burns best when he writes benedictions.  He was very graceful in these.  This passage from a lament for James, the Earl of Glencairn very much put me in mind of my friend Rob who passed away almost a year ago now:

"The bridegroom may forget the bride

Was made his wedding wife yestereen;

The monarch may forget the crown

That on his head an hour has been;

The mother may forget the child

That smiles sae sweetly on her knee;

But I'll remember thee, Glencairn,

And a' that thou hast done for me!"

As we become more distant from one another even as we grow more global as a culture, the poems of Robert Burns are one of those literary treasure troves caches growing dusty from misuse.  This is a tragedy we all share.  I cannot recommend highly enough that you get a volume of Burns and read from it as often as you can.

Just limit yourself to a half dozen poems or less a day. 

Good Wine For The Rest Of Us- A Tutorial

omni homo primum bonum vinum ponit et cum inebriati fuerint tunc id quod deterius est tu servasti bonum vinum usque adhuc 

There are two types of people who write about wine: those who put forth the image of expertise and those who start by saying, "I'm no expert. I'm just someone who loves wine."  In an attempt to elucidate my point I shall employ an analogy.  When I was in college, there was a girl I tried to date once who was a fan of the music of Tori Amos.  I too enjoyed the work of Tori Amos, but the experience taught me something.  There are two types of fans of Tori Amos: those who love Tori Amos, and those who love Tori Amos and many other things in life as well.  Being a latter at the time, it was immediately evident to both of us that an impassable chasm lay between the two mindsets.

While I do accept the designation of oenophile, I am strictly an amateur.   I am never going to be one who gets paid to devote their life to wine.  Given my vow of poverty, I'm never going to be one of those people who get to buy a case of Chateau Lafite Rothschild Bordeaux and properly store it in a wine cellar for upwards of 20 years.  But this does not mean that I am doomed to a life of bad wine.  I do know a few things that may help the perplexed and thought it might be helpful to some hypothetical out there to craft a blog post on the topic. It is the next in my new series of "bon vivre sans crainte" posts.

You may have heard it said that a good, or even great, bottle of wine is not necessarily the most expensive.  I will say right up front that this post is not intending to be a full course of the subject of wine, teaching you about all aspects on the subject, transforming you into a fountain of wit and fascination at your next cocktail party.  This post is meant to fill a void that I see in wine discussions for the novice, which is simple direction on getting a good bottle of wine into your hands in a market flooded with variety, especially focusing on the audience who may have budget dictated restrictions.  This is my contribution to the question "How do I even get started?"

Where to buy:

Ideally you will want to find a wine merchant.  Depending where you're located this may be a small wine shop or one of those grand, lush (as it were) places with a bar made from the wood of a tree that Beowulf used to worship and a sommelier in a new and freshly pressed Monterey Jazz Festival t-shirt.  If you're in Northern California like me or in other famous wine-making regions, there are vintners at your very backyard waiting to give you tours, tastings, and exits through the gift shop.

Also ideally, a wealthy eccentric has picked your name at random from a phone book, willed their multi-billion dollar estate to you, and died, leaving you to a life of leisure, beauty, philanthropy, and solving mysteries.  In other words, the ideals above are the sort of thing that give the appearance of good wine being cost prohibitive.  I will touch on the "investment wines" briefly, but we are mainly concerned with the daily glass, maybe the weekend dinner party glass, in this article.  Above are the sort of places one can indulge in when one is on vacation or has a sudden windfall.  But what about those of us who toil and labor for our happiness?

General rule of thumb: if you could, not saying you would, but if it is possible to go to make your purchase and buy a Snickers bar along with your bottle of wine, you are in the wrong place.  A local organic food co-op is a good place to try.  The sort places you go to avoid other supermarkets and wish you could just buy everything there (e.g. Trader Joe's, World Market, Whole Foods) are also decent places for our purposes.

A few words on the largest wine distributor in America:

Inevitably in these conversations, someone trying to be helpful will mention America's largest wine distributor.  The largest wine distributor in America is Costco.  For those of you unfamiliar with Costco, it is to Walmart what basic cable is to regular television.  You pay a yearly subscription and can then purchase bulk items at the illusion of bulk item prices.  For effect I shall indulge myself in the hyperbolic and state that my experience shopping there is to Dante's Gluttony circle of Hell (complete with three heads guarding the threshold) what Begotten is to the Book of Genesis.  Yes, you can find a decent wine at Costco, but first of all, remember the candy purchasing tip.  Second, the purpose of this entire endeavor is to improve the quality of our lives.  While I cringe at those who apply the axiom broadly to all of life, I do feel that in the case of luxury items, the concept "If it's not fun, don't do it" is applicable.  Granted, I suppose for the more adventurous out there a trip to an emergent lugubrious region re-enactment society in order to bring home a prize could be fulfilling in a Greco-Roman heroic sort of way.  I cannot personally recommend this course of action.

What To Buy:

First and foremost, ask questions of people who know more than you.  You may want to bear in mind that the person you're talking to may have recently had a meeting where their supervisor instructed them to push a certain wine, but that isn't always necessarily a bad thing.  Just something to keep in mind.  As Socrates said, "As for me, all I know is that I know nothing."  Never be shy to learn.  Ignorance is an opportunity to be seized.  If there is a meaning to existence, I imagine it probably falls close to the whole "we are the process of physics appreciating itself" theory.

There are, however, a few guidelines I would offer.


Eschew the novelty wines.  You may get a chuckle when you bring out the bottle of Scraping the Barrel or Cardinal Zin (and I hasten to add that these may be just fine.  I wouldn't know and don't plan on finding out), but so often the memorability of those bottles does not extend beyond the label.  Another rule of thumb: ask yourself What Would Jeeves Do? (you may even be able to procure a bracelet with that acronym) and then steer toward the more conservative labels.

This is your chance to explore and learn, try new things, and discover for yourself what you like and don't like.  I would also steer you away from Pinot Noir as it is not a varietal generally associated with the word "budget."

I look for a red wine with a fairly deep punt (the indentation in the bottom of the bottle) about two finger-knuckles deep:

"Why?"  Well, there are a lot of views of the punt out there.  I was taught that it has to do with the distribution of the sediments at the bottom of the bottle and/or, more specifically, that the wine-maker cares about such things.  If you are purchasing a nicer bottle of red, you will want to store it for several years and, when you do, things like sediment become important.

On the label you want to look for the word "Reserva" or some linguistic variation thereof.  Briefly, it is generally the best of the batch.

But the key to buying better wine on a budget is knowing your regions.  It's a bit reductionist to say that a particular region generally is known for doing something specific better than others, however "reductionism" is also today's secret word!  Here's a quick chart which you can clip and keep in your wallet, culled largely from The Winemaker Cooks: Menus, Parties, and Pairings

Northern California- sparkling and white.  Think "like the weather".  Zinfandels and Shiraz to be sure but any good wine cellar/rack is going to have Sonoma Coast Chardonnays.  It is also, for us deep red fans, the place for Cabernet Sauvignon, the king of wines, and Merlot, the archbishop.

Oregon's Willamette Valley- Pinot Gris

New Zealand- Sauvignon Blanc

France- Cabs, champagne.  All those clarets from the Bordeaux region.

Italy- Falanghina, Soave, Aglianico, Sauvignon Blanc, Cabs


Australia- sparkling, Rieslings, Chardonnays, Semillons.


Spain- Andalusian sherry, Tempranillo, Macabeo, Palomino, Pedro Ximenez, Garnacha, Verdejo.


India- Ah, my beloved India!  Cabs, Shiraz, Merlot, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and Zins.


Portugal-Port and Madeira


Chile- Cabernet and Merlot especially. Chardonnay, Syrah, Sauvignon Blanc, Rieslings, Gewurztraminers, Carmenere.

Switzerland- Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Semillon


Argentina- Malbec, Cabs, Chardonnay, Merlot, and Torrontes.


There are more, but there's a good start.  If this is for a dinner party, Chardonnay for chicken and fish, Cabs for beef.  Leave pork pairings to the infidels.  You're on your own with cheese and dessert.  That is far to intricate a topic for our purposes here.  Although I would take a moment to say that the dessert wines should be sweeter than the dessert and, therefore, should be poured with restraint.

A quick word on stoppers: In days gone by, a good wine was corked.  This is no longer accepted wisdom and you can find really great wine with screwtops and those weird polymer corks.  The days of recoiling from non-corked bottles are over.

When To Drink:

This is where a person in the know is indispensable in the purchasing of wine.  Some wines are fine to drink as soon as you get in the door.  Heck, in the car on the way home if you want!  Some wines you want to let age slowly.  Ideally you will have a place to store your wine out of direct light, cool, even a bit humid if you can swing it, stored on their side and turned every month or so.

How To Drink:

There's a reason why people keep wine in cellars.  You want your reds cool and your whites cold.

Use all of your senses.  Look, smell, taste.  Um... listen, I guess.  Remember that a great deal of your taste mechanism is ties up with your sense of smell.  Historically, the practice of giving a sample at the table at a restaurant and the host of the table smelling, then tasting, is vestigial from by-gone days when one was more likely to encounter a bad bottle of wine. 

Personally, I highly highly recommend a wine aerator.  They are not that expensive and I will testify under oath that they work with red wines (largely useless for white wines.)  They will make a great wine better, and a not so great wine better (we run a lot of Two Buck Chuck through ours.)  Occasionally you will encounter someone who calls them a gimmick, but it is from the same type of person who would say that an electric mixer is a waste of time because you can whip egg whites by hand.  Sure you can.  Sure you can.

There is so much more that could be said, but I think I've provided a skeleton.  Have fun and explore.  Enjoy!

Ta!

Let's All Write a Ballade!

You: Eine minuten bitte!  Haven't we already done this form, Paul?

Me:  No, that was a ballad.  This is a ballade.

You:  Well, you ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer.

Me:  The ballade is a very old French poetic form.  The name of the form means "dancing song" which went far to inform my choice in material.  More on that in a moment.

This is, in my opinion, along with the sestina, most likely one of the more difficult forms we've tackled thus far.  One of the more traditional variations is three rhymed stanzas; final line of the stanzas repeat and the three stanzas are followed by an envoi, which is half the length of the stanzas, addressed to an important figure, and generally summing up the thesis of the matter expressed in the poem.  The rhyme scheme is as follows: ababbcbC ababbcbC ababbcbC bcbC. Got it?  That's okay.  That's why the good Lord gave us examples.

Unfortunately I was unable to come up with an example of a famous ballade being read or sung in English to my satisfaction by means of example for this post.  So, I took it upon myself to record one for the occasion, which I probably should have been doing all along.  Here is A Ballade of Suicide by G.K. Chesterton, read by me.




And here is the ballade of my own composition.  Ron Padgett expresses that ballades are often tailored to a specific occasion.  That mixed with the "dancing song" lead me to reflect on this specific time of year.  It is the very merry month of May in which, much to the chagrin of my sinuses, everything is blooming.  Of course, May also makes me think of May Day, the holiday of the extreme Left, which also put me in mind of how we are in that time of year when there are very few holidays.  I love the Spring, but it becomes a bit quotidian in going to work, coming home, going on walks, and so forth.  Between Easter and Independence Day, I am hard pressed to think of any major holiday markers in my year.  But returning to the theme of Spring and dancing, I pictured togas and outdoor dancing around a fire, a rite of Spring feeling.  Then I sat down and composed this:

Bona Dea Ballade
by Paul Mathers

Play Now!  Beat ye a tune upon the tabor!
Phoebus reflecting on verdant Spring's moon.
To mark the end of a warm day's labor
a draught, a dance, a merry piper's tune,
we shed our clothes, our wintery cocoon.
Invoke Terpsichore and Bacchus with lyre.
Our joy and hope to plant what will grow soon
and so we honor May with this bonfire.

As Peter's fingerprint on the zeus faber,
the budding green the hillsides now festoon.
Crops we hope the gods will show their favor.
Our time spent out of doors is opportune
to love and work, to pleasure and commune
with Nature's blooming bounty we aspire.
So now to Death we fancy us immune.
And so we honor May with this bonfire.

In unity we grasp the hands of neighbors.
Our path we with all sacred life attune.
Our ploughshares made of former swords and sabers
and drunk with blessed existence we swoon.
'Pon this small blue dot which we all were hewn,
our forefathers who crawled out of the mire,
that Fortune permits us at all's a boon.
And so we honor May with this bonfire.

Maia, who follows Artemis in lune,
May your regard this Beltane we acquire.
May none your sweet benevolence impugn.
And so we honor May with this bonfire.

All I Want Is A Proper Cup of Coffee Made in a Proper Copper Coffee Pot

The Sultan and Kersia

In spite of my well-documented tea enthusiasm, I am also a devotee of coffee.  In fact, I would estimate that I drink more coffee than I drink tea.  This is probably partly due to having had the past decade of circumstances dictating remarkably peculiar sleep schedules (while tea contains more caffeine per pound than coffee, a cup of coffee actually contains more caffeine than a cup of tea.  We will unpack the reason for this anon.  It has to do with what one does with the product.)  But undoubtedly it also has to do with my tendency to gravitate toward deep, dark, rich flavors (e.g. dark chocolate, red wine, black tea, opaque beers, heavily spicy foods, and, back in the days before I was stricken with asthma, pipe tobacco.)  

Before we get started on brewing methods, a quick word about purchasing a good coffee.  There are fabulously grand brands of coffee and, indeed, an entire culture of extraordinarily fancy, ornate, and sublime coffees out there.  A fine starting point for the novice is this book: God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee which deals with the world of hyper-excellent coffee-making and the hyper-obsessive people embroiled in the quest for the peak coffee experience. When one ventures into the finer varieties of those beverages, one finds that they contain flavors that one never would have associated with the drink.  As our hero Mr. Lagerfeld might say, they go "beyond coffee" to places where one gains a deeper understanding of the drink and, I would even dare falling into pretension to suggest, the universe around them.

It is a deep rabbit hole which one who wishes to engage further in the world can spend a lot of time exploring.  However, for our purposes here, we are hardly talking about cupping or techniques of roasting or "God in a Cup."  I will leave exploration thereof to the enthusiastic.  You can geek out significantly on coffee and I recommend that you do.  Here, on the other hand, I mean to focus, via my new gadget, on waking up of an average morning and brewing one's self a very good cup of coffee as a reward for continuing to exist.  There is a reason why it is the second most traded commodity on Earth today, second only to crude oil (and, as a renewable resource, less vulnerable in the marketplace to the whims of speculators.)

As for the diurnal cup, find a decent dark roast whole bean coffee (leave the roasting and blending to the professionals unless you become so much of an enthusiast that you branch out in that direction too.  It really is a craft in the most Germanic sense of the word.)  Eschew the aluminum can.  Ideally, grind it yourself and don't buy more than a week's worth at one time.  Use about two tablespoons of grounds to six ounces of water.  As to what to use to brew it, I've used a French Press for the past six months until my friend Paul sent me a style of coffee-maker, entirely new to me, for my birthday.

Of course, with tea, the idea is to infuse the water with the flavor of the tea leaves by pouring water over them (my mnemonic device of my own devising:
"Tea over water
isn't how you oughta.
Water over tea,
that's how it should be") and seeping the leaves in the water for a few minutes.  With coffee, I do not recommend a drip coffee-maker because the concept is similar to tea infusion and you miss several of the elements present in other coffee-makers with the goal of extracting as much flavor from the bally beans as you can.  Coffee and tea are comparable to apples and oranges.  Also, drip brewing systems are difficult to clean properly and, in my experience, will never last you as long as a French Press.  You get a much better cup from wetting the grounds, allowing them to infuse into the water, then pressing every last bit of flavor back out of them.  An espresso maker (one of which we also own.  It was a wedding gift) is good for this as you compact the grounds very tightly and the high temperature and high pressure of the water sort of do that job for you.  However, in my experience, an espresso maker in the home is a bit too involved when you wake up at 3:40 and have to get on the road by 4:00.  Besides, it is called an Espresso maker because it was intended to make the form of specific coffee drink known as Espresso, which is galaxies away from what we're talking about here.  Like so much of life, one must take into account the age-old wisdom "Just because we can do a thing doesn't necessarily mean that we should." 

I have also heard convincing arguments in favor of what is known as a vacuum coffee pot, but every time I look at one I think "You know, I couldn't imagine having one of those in my home before I own a Tesla Coil and a Theremin."

But, let's get to today's experiment with my brand new AeroPress Coffee Maker which the package boasts is the best coffee maker that someone who said that has ever owned:

One places the cylinder on top of one's coffee mug, places a small round filter (provided in abundance with the maker, but also easily fashioned on one's own) at the bottom and fills the cylinder with coffee grounds, then water.  Stir the two for a few seconds, then place the plunger in the top of the cylinder.

Simply by firmly pressing the plunger down with firm but slow pressure, you are super-brewing your coffee by harnessing several forces of physics at once.  Gravity, infusion, and pressure are all making a very strong cup of coffee for you.  Now here's the taste test.

Yes, I have to admit, it is a darned fine cup of coffee.  In fact, better than I'd anticipated.  The speed with which is makes a good cup of coffee and the ease of cleanup were beyond my expectations.

Aroma Comments: Excellent, heady, whisps of the aroma waft up the nose to tickle the olfactory bulbs of your brain.

Acidity: Good and hearty without giving cause for fear.

Mouthfeel: Superlative.  Like a mouthful of rich caramel (See previous post)

Flavour: Dark, rich, heavy, everything I love about coffee.  The fantastic aroma slaps a bit of the bitter away.

Aftertaste: Fumigating my oral cavity like holding a puff of cigar smoke.

Balance, overall notes: Extremely balanced.  Balanced beyond measure.  Balancing itself off kilter.

Final Scoring:  I feel I am not overstating by saying that this was one of the better cups of coffee I've ever made.

And now we have a cute little coffee-making nook on our kitchen counter.

 The one advantage I would still say the French Press has over the AeroPress is that it makes about a pot's worth of coffee at once.  However, I must needs concede that the AeroPress makes a better cup of coffee.  Thank you, Paul.

I hope you've enjoyed my brief, remedial coffee tutorial.  Now here's a novelty song:

How to make homemade caramel

Tonight I was sitting on the porch, alternately translating the Latin Vulgate into English and reading the poetry of Robert Burns, when I was struck with a theopneustic moment in light of a difficult few days and, specifically, remedies thereunto.  Knowing full well Laurie will be home soon, I thought, "Wouldn't it be nice for her to come home to some homemade caramel for putting on iced cream or popping corn?"

Caramel is ridiculously easy to make and, once you know how quick, economical, and easy the process, you will most likely wonder why you don't do it all the time.  Soon you too will ridicule how easy it is to make.

First you need 1 cup of sugar, 6 Tablespoons of butter, and a half cup of Half and Half (or any other milk derivative you have laying around your fridge.  I just happen to always have Half and Half on hand for tea.  I would recommend the thicker milk products, closer to the cream end of the spectrum.  I am in no position to recommend Fat Free or Soy Milk.)  Keep all of these right next to you because the process is exceedingly quick.  You will be called upon to move quickly in the preparation of your caramel or the whole thing will go to pot, as it were.  It is a testimony to my deft camera finger that I was able to photograph the experience for this post at all.  If you put Tom Waits' Glitter and Doom album on when you start (like I did) you will be done before Get Behind The Mule is over.

Place the sugar in a saucepan.  You want a higher heat.  When the edges of the sugar in the pan begin to brown and pull away from the edge of the pan, you start whisking.  This is a crucial moment and you must be diligent in your whisking.  Burning is a very real peril in this process.  Be ever vigilant in your whisking, my little catechumen confectioners!

 If you can, you probably want a larger whisk as the pan is very hot.  You will whisk the sugar until...

 ...it is roughly the consistency of caramel.  Let me restate, what is shown in this picture is just sugar at this point.

Then you add the butter and whisk until it melts.  Oh yes, get used to whisking.  Your universe is a whisking universe for the next few minutes.  Note the discarded novelty whisk which I started with until I darned near singed all of my arm hair off.

Is it all melted now?  Are you responding by saying "yes?"  Then it's time to take it off of the heat and place the pan on one of the neighboring cooler burners.

You will keep whisking and slowly pour the Half and Half into the mixture.  This rushed picture with my thumb halfway over the flash fails to capture what a dramatic juncture this is in our narrative.  It bubbles and steams and tries to wrap its fingers around your throat to drag you down to Hell as the three ingredients die by your hand and a new foodstuff is born like the phoenix.  Do not heed that devil-caramel!  Whisk it into submission!

Soon it will get over itself and look like caramel.  You will initially think you put in too much Half and Half, but never fear!  It will thicken upon settling.

And now you have homemade caramel which tastes as good as store-bought because it is the same thing.

Rhinoviral Review! A guide for the perplexed

Things I do when I have a head cold that truly seem to help:

1. The Neti-pot (pictured above.)  Sinus irrigation that seems to stave off my natural propensity to transform a rhinoviral infection into a secondary infection, be it in the sinus cavity or the bronchial tubes.  I cannot recommend this invention highly enough.
2. Cold-Eeze lozenges or their generic counterparts.  I swear by them that, taken every second waking hour during a head cold, they genuinely shorten the length and intensity of the cold.  I also employ menthol lozenges, however I assume their effect are purely palliative.
3. Analgesics and lots of them overlapping as often as I can.  Inflammation is your enemy, so pump yourself full of anti-inflammatories I say.
4. Steam.  Breathed in liberally especially upon waking.
5. Lots of sleep.  My mother taught me that if I'm too sick to go to school, I'm too sick to play.  I still have that ethic.  Today, for example, I slept about 16 hours.
6. Lots of fluids, especially those gleaned from citrus fruit.

Things I do when I have a head cold which may or may not work.  I genuinely don't know but do them anyway:

1. Chamomile tea with a spoonful of molasses.
2. Apple cider vinegar.
3. A half a glass of red wine taken in the hour of sleep.
4. Feeding a cold.  These two seem more like an excuse although I am told that the body needs extra nutrients when fighting a virus.  Laurie notes the gusto with which I apply this proverb.
5. Nasal spray.  Used very sparingly and even less so since I've discovered the Neti-pot.  But I was told by my physician many years ago that leaving a sinus cavity congested is a bit like having a rain forest.  An eco-system will evolve there.  I have also heard convincing arguments that nasal sprays can do more harm than good in the "come down."

Things I do when I have a head cold which probably don't help, but I do anyway: '

1. Deny that I have a head cold.


P.S. I am returning to work tomorrow.  Thank you to all of the well wishers and I wish you all a healthy Spring.

Fernando Pessoa on my brain

I usually attempt to eschew quotations in my writings aside from the occasional epigram or quotational exclamation point to something I've just said (occasionally sneaking an "appeal to authority" logical fallacy in to see if anyone notices.)  I'll spare you my finger wagging reasons why.  Suffice it to say, I feel better in my writing when quotation is a tool used infrequently.

Having said that, I just came across this passage by the incomparable Fernando Pessoa from  The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Classics)
which, through its high accuracy, struck me to the quick.  Pessoa, along with being one of the greatest writers in history, is clearly a time traveler and a mind reader.  The quote below is a fine illustration of about 1/3rd of the existential dilemma I've been writing about of late.  I think about this all the time and, perhaps if you do too, you may at the very least find a modicum of consolation in the articulation of the existential dread.  You may even feel slightly less lonely.

Lacking the time to formulate an original post for the next day or two, I thought I would post it here to share it, but also to have a place of easy reference for myself (by the way, I hadn't announced it on this blog yet, but I am now officially writing another play.  More on that soon.)  Here's Pessoa:

“If I carefully consider the life men lead, I find nothing to distinguish it from the life of animals. Both man and animal are hurled unconsciously through things and the world; both have their leisure moments; both complete the same organic cycle day after day; both think nothing beyond what they think, nor live beyond what they live. A cat wallows in the sun and goes to sleep. Man wallows in life, with all of its complexities, and goes to sleep. Neither one escapes the fatal flaw law of being what he is. Neither one tries to shake off the weight of being. The greatest among men love glory, but not the glory of a personal immortality, just an abstract immortality, in which they don’t necessarily participate.

"These considerations, which occur to me frequently, prompt an admiration in me for a kind of person that by nature I abhor. I mean the mystics and ascetics—the recluses of all Tibets, the Simeon Stylites of all columns. These men, albeit by absurd means, do indeed try to escape the animal law. These men, although they act madly, do indeed reject the law of life by which others wallow in the sun and wait for death without thinking about it. They really seek, even if on top of a column; they yearn, even if in an unlit cell; they long for what they don’t know, even if in the suffering and martyrdom they’re condemned to.

"The rest of us, living animal lives of varying complexity, cross the stage as walk-ons who don’t speak, satisfied by the pompous solemnity of the crossing. Dogs and men, cats and heroes, fleas and geniuses—we all play at existing without thinking about it (the most advanced of us thinking only about thinking) under the vast stillness of the stars. The others—the mystics of pain and sacrifice—at least feel, in their body and their daily lives, the magic presence of mystery. They have escaped, for they reject the visible sun; they know plenitude, for they’ve emptied themselves of the world’s nothingness.

"Speaking about them, I almost feel like a mystic myself, though I know I could never be more than these words written whenever the whim hits me. I will always belong to the Rua dos Douradores, like all of humanity. I will always be, in verse or prose, an office employee. I will always be, with or without mysticism, local and submissive, a servant of my feelings and of the moments when they occur. I will always be, under the large blue canopy of the silent sky, a pageboy in an unintelligible rite, dressed in life for the occasion, executing steps, gestures, stances and expressions without knowing why, until the feats—or my role in it—ends and I can treat myself to tidbits in the large tents I’ve been told are down below, at the back of the garden.”

My 34th Birthday

It was a perfect storm of allergens.  Zephyrus was feeling sprightly and it sprinkled just enough to invigorate the tree pollen, not enough to wash any of it away.  As a result I had a low grade sinus headache for my birthday until wine o'clock.

However, first thing upon rising I was greeted by a cheerful knock from the postman who had brought me my recent book order.

The two books are Biblia Sacra Vulgata (Vulgate): Holy Bible in Latin (Latin Edition) and Winnie Ille Pu (Latin Edition). Laurie had a day full of work and meeting, so the rest of my day resembled a more cheerful end of the 'Time Enough At Last' episode of The Twilight Zone had it taken place after the advent of shatterproof lenses.

I've had seafood on my mind for a few weeks and Laurie and I went out for same.

With malice towards none, I will point out Laurie's food in her photo and my folded, patient hands in mine.  Something went terribly wrong with my order twice and I was finally given a complementary meal.  Terribly wrong.  Like I ordered a steak and the first time they brought me a telephone on fire and the second time they brought me cotton gauze drizzled with WD-40.  I felt bad for the server who was afraid we would be mad.  I wanted to explain to her that we were the best possible customers this could happen to for her, that it's just luxury food and they had done me no malicious evil, and that the restaurant had, in fact, given occasion for something memorable on my birthday.  I finally had a nice plate of salmon and shrimp.

And that was my 34th birthday.

Crimes Against Humanities

"By means of beauty all beautiful things become beautiful." - Socrates

In my mid-20s, I had a nervous breakdown.  It came as I was suffering the birth-pangs from the womb of higher education into adulthood, but also as my entire plan for that adult life, which I had been working toward for years, were shattered when the woman I planned to marry dumped me to join a Buddhist meditation community and immediately start seeing someone else.  I went a little cra-cra after that.

At the time I was seeing a psychiatrist-in-training from a local university.  There are clinics that exist in some universities where one can receive analysis, therapy, treatment, the whole she-bang, for a supremely diminished fee.  Personally I feel that, unlike a barber's college, the less experienced may be an asset in this case as the psychiatrist is closer to their education and, more importantly, possibly more current in their understanding of the understanding of workings of the human mind.

The experience helped me through that difficult time and, I think, equipped me for the transition into adulthood in a lot of ways.  It was very helpful and I still highly recommend "#1 on the Stanislavski chart" to everyone.  But a lot of the harder, more existential wrestling matches in my life have been resolved or, at least, ameliorated in some less conventional outlets.  As many of you know, religion has been more of a battlefield than a refuge for me.  So much of my therapy has come from other places.

I was listening to All Things Considered the other day when, to my great surprise, a story came on which struck me rather across the face as being intensely classist.  The story was about the disturbing trend in America of defunding public libraries (as though those were a huge economic drain in the first place.  But I'm already getting ahead of myself.)  The story, however, did not focus on that trend being disturbing.  Instead the story focused on eBooks, specifically the scramble to optimize profits in that industry and the burden that free lending libraries place on that goal.  One solution seems to be the trend toward limiting the amounts of times one can "check out" the virtual intellectual property before the customer (in this case the library) is forced to re-purchase the book.

But hiding in the periphery of the story was the point that has been like a stone in my shoe for the past week.  The person interviewed and the interviewer both suggested that brick and mortar libraries with brick and mortar books are becoming archaic in the digital age.  I felt they even went so far as to suggest that this was common knowledge and a point not open for debate.  I've stated my position on eBooks before.  First of all, I don't have an eBook reader because I never have a disposable income of $100+ to spend on one and most of the books I stuff into my brain through my eyes come into my hands gratis, either by parties who support my decidedly bohemian path, or by the very public libraries that, paradoxically, the public radio program was denigrating.  I am not against eBooks.  In fact, I'm very excited by the world of possibilities they afford, perhaps undermining the Boy's Club publishing industry just as the internet undermined the Boy's Club music industry about a decade ago, and opening the doors for authors who may not have otherwise "made it."  I also think the readers, specifically the Kindle and the Nook, are aesthetically pleasing.  They look like things I would enjoy carrying around.  They also get internet access anywhere, for those times when you're walking down the street thinking "What was the name of that Weimar era cabaret performance artist who staged psycho-sexual nightmares and was fired for breaking a champagne bottle over the head of a patron?"

I live in a poor neighborhood and we have ongoing issues with people who have chosen "substance abuser" as the key selling point on their curriculum vitae.  We live directly in the path between the soup kitchen and the shelter, which occasions all manner of behavior outside of the realm of accepted legal social behavior taking place in and around our front yard.  It also occasions the people who, for any number of reasons, have been thrown out of said soup kitchen or shelter to camp in or around my front yard.  There is a specific older gentleman I'm thinking of who lives in a 1970s one-person sleeper RV filled with detritus which spills out when the door is open, making him into an unwitting Hansel, who camps, lets his dog run free, sells and indulges in what I assume to be methamphetamines, and whose key personality hook, in my experience, seems to be belligerence. The function of the lending library will not be obsolete until that man has unlimited and free access to an eBook reader.  I am not saying that their existence will effect this outcome, but their existence ensures that at any time he can go into that building and learn just about anything.

I have another facet of the argument to illustrate, exiting the tenuous realm of the hypothetical and entering the privileged position of personal testimony.  In a lot of ways, I was a version of the man in that story once.  I was once a drunkard, and I spent a lot of time in front of the television, filling my brain with mediocre crap.  At one point, I had a major health scare that gave occasion for me to reevaluate what I was doing with my life.  The library is where I then went and largely where I have stayed.  I remember one startling realization I had, which is a microcosm of what I am talking about.  Laying on my bed, staring at the cottage cheese ceiling after brushing with mortality,  the scales fell away from my eyes, and I awakened to the knowledge that I'd never at that point heard one of Beethoven's symphonies all the way through, but that I had probably watched days worth of Gilligan's Island.  And I didn't even like Gilligan's Island.

I have a virtual friend, Maura Lafferty, who recently said, "There isn't much in life that can't be solved by Beethoven's 7th." There is a great truth to that statement.

In college, I largely studied the works of, and how to produce productions of, the works of William Shakespeare.   I took a Shakespeare Intensive course through Shakespeare & Company.  We chose a passage from Shakespeare to work on.  The first few days we worked on establishing the emotional connection to the piece.  The latter few we worked on text work (scoring the trochees, spondees, and dactyls, and that sort of thing.)  I chose a short passage from the beginning of The Winter's Tale when Leontes is waxing soliloquific about his nascent suspicion of his wife's infidelity.  I was walked through a series of questions which left me a wailing mass of tears on the floor, what is referred to in psychological circles as "a breakthrough."  I was wailing uncontrollably on the floor like a child having an enraged tantrum being ignored and feeling entirely powerless in a savage, predatory world.  I was unable to stop it and I remember several people coming and holding me down at one point.  Much later I was able to articulate that it was as if I had previously thought I had a well within me, but I then discovered that I had a dormant volcano that extended down to the Earth's molten core.

Later, I had a friend who directed me in a directing-class project of the "wooing of Lady Anne" scene from Richard III.  I played Richard and I obsessively threw myself into the part and the study of the work.  I remember having a moment, and it still haunts me a little, where I became hyper-aware that I, Paul Mathers, could, under the right circumstances, given certain external stimuli, be Richard III.  I could kill.  So could anyone else.  We all have within us the potential for the greatest good and the starkest evil, or anything in-between.  This realization walks around with me.  Sometimes it is supremely encouraging.  Sometimes it is terrifying.

So often I have worked through a problem with the aid of the humanities.  When Rob died last year, as I've so often mentioned, I found no comfort in the places one is commonly sent for comfort in times of grief by well meaning parties.  Much to my surprise, I found so much comfort in what I happened to be reading at the time, which was Plato's accounts of the death of Socrates.  I have had occasion to recommend the same in the past year to a few people who have been struggling in similar ways in their own lives.  

There have been many who have articulated the argument for the humanities far better than I.  It is an age old and, I dare say, aphoristic problem that arts and education tend to take the first and harshest cuts whenever budgets are tightened in a society.  There are even highly insulting terms often employed like "entitlements" or "unmonetizable knowledge" that inevitably rear their ugly heads.  At the risk of being crass, one can imagine the social puppeteers or lunatics who, as the adage would have it, have appropriated the office of the Psychiatric hospital's chief doctor, fully realizing the profit loss of touching the war machine, protecting, creating, and imperializing their financial interests and certainly not touching their own pay rate.  Defunding Crackhead Jim's access to beauty and truth seems a much easier pill to swallow.  It is a reptilian mindset that suggests parents who give their child a dollar instead of a hug every time the child cries out for love.

Although I will tarry a moment longer in the domain of polemic to point out the key flaw in the "unmonetizable" argument.  It can be illustrated by this formula:

The level of focus on The Profit Margin is in direct proportion to the output of crap.

You want a better profit margin, you use cheaper ingredients, you fire the experienced workers and hire cheaper, less experienced employees, you cut corners, you save time.  This is why a 30 year old vacuum cleaner is better than a new one.  This is the slippery slope of attention to wealth.

Example: 1995- "Let's reclaim the invention of the television for education!  Let's make a television station called The Wonder Channel, funded both by subscription AND advertisers, and create content based on learning, exploring, wonder, creativity, truth, and beauty!"
2011- "Next up on '-Der': Barbecue Pit Bosses.  Join Cleavus and Lil' Vinton as they build backyard barbecue pits.  You will learn neither how to make a barbecue pit nor how to barbecue from watching this program.  Mainly you will watch the two leads yell bleeped out swears at each other.  Brought to you by Tadalafil."

Eventually the series is canceled when a video from the cutting room floor is leaked to YouTube in which Cleavus gives a profanity-laden rant against one of the credit card companies that finance the show.  The entire story is sad and makes the world seem slightly lonelier and life seem slightly more fleeting in the collective unconscious until the only flaccid pleasure people can derive from interacting with the world at large is mock and scoff, guffawing at the very Hellbound handbasket in which they are firmly tucked.

Although a Theater major, I am able to readily identify the unsustainabilty of a system where the bulk of the wealth is funneling to an increasingly smaller percentage of the population and that increasingly smaller percentage is paying increasingly less into the system.  The three card monte game of the Right is to fool the working class, through appeals to down-hominess, old fashioned values and so forth, into thinking that they, the Proles, can one day, through hard work and enterprising, become one of them, the Cake-Eaters.  This is false.

So, the news is full of talk about defunding the arts and education.  As I said before, it's an easy place to cut when you're holding the cutting device and when you interests lay elsewhere.  It's way easier to fund and maintain a prison-industrial complex than a flourishing public education system.  And, if you don't do the latter, you're going to have to do the former, so I guess they go for what's cheaper and easier.  But once again I think of society as something we will to make.  The world is what we make of it.  What if we had a population who were consumed with truth, beauty, love, equality, and unity?  Let's not even go that far though.  What if we just had a society where humankind's expressions of and arguments for those highest of virtues were accessible to every citizen?  How much better would that be?

And I'm not necessarily making the argument for government funding of the humanities exclusively.  As with any other source of funding, there is always the problem of "biting the hand that feeds" the arts, much like poor Cleavus.  I am in favor of heavy government funding of the sciences and the humanities.  But more to the point, I am for accessibility to the sciences and humanities for everyone.  There are many admirable attempts at putting the cookies on lower shelves within the humanities.  There are "rush" seatings at most live concert and theater venues in which one can go to the ticket booth within the last 30 minutes before a performance and get severely discounted seats.  Many theaters have "pay what thou wilt" nights.  The internet has an embarrassment of riches of free resources of lectures, classes, and readings, free for the taking.  The doors to the libraries are still open.

I think that the humanities have so much to offer a society.  If we must talk about the monetizable aspects (and, unfortunately, there exists the type of philistine tromping around the offices of elected officials who will demand the monetizable aspects) I would bring up health care.  Foresight dictates that the future of health care demands preventative health measures.  However, the prevailing philosophy of modern western medicine trends exclusively toward the palliative.  George Bernard Shaw wrote a brilliant foreword to his play The Doctor's Dilemma in which he makes the point that the paradox of the medical field is that if it ever reached a point of ultimate efficacy, it would put itself out of business.

The Humanities are good for the future health of a society.  They allow so many avenues for growth, education, and progress.  A civilization filled with growing, educated, and progressing individuals has a more optimistic future than one filled with demotivated, ignorant, cynics.  So, investing in the Humanities as a society is much like putting aside money into a long term IRA or Keogh plan.

The Humanities offer so much in the way of mental and physical health to the individual as well.  They are a conduit for the highest aspirations of humankind.  The Humanities are indicative of a good life, which is something that no one should be denied access to.  I would hasten to add that anyone who has studied the great civilizations of old knows that so often the great civilizations fall at the hands of utter brutes.  As Dystopian authors or social commentators know, there is a great danger in hiding the light under bushels of reaching the point where "We have seen the brutes who will fell our civilization, and they are us."

The Value of Nothing

When I was in my early 20s, I had a dream one night which was one of the most important experiences in my subconscious life to date.  You see, when I was a child, I had a very rich fantasy life which was fueled by gross dissatisfaction with or outright fear of my peers.  My fantasies would mainly revolve around being rescued from this life by Professor X or Gandalf or by suddenly falling heir to Scrooge McDuck's fortune and being whisked away to an exciting and adventurous place where being smart and different is an asset rather than a liability.  In my adolescent life, this tendency mutated into a sort of ham-fisted rebellious streak until finally settling, in my early 20s, into the borderline agoraphobic intellectual that you all know and love today.

The dream was about an anthropomorphic manifestation of a universal construct called The Timekeeper of Always.  I somehow made the acquaintance of that being and he showed me what goes on behind reality.  Reality pulled away like a curtain and I was able to observe what goes on behind everything, the reality in which this one is but a poor reflection of a reflection.  Then he thought better of it, replaced the curtain, wiped the memory of what was behind the curtain from my mind, and returned me to the world of consciousness.  I woke up unable to remember anything of what was behind the curtain, but able to remember the rest of the dream.  It was terrible.  Rational Paul knows that this was a manifestation of those same latent desires from childhood, likely poured through the filter of a time in my life when I exclusively read Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, Clive Barker, and Neil Gaiman.  Still, I am able to tap into that sense of cosmic loss that I felt on waking and here, 12 year later, I am still able to remember the dream (the parts that were not wiped from my memory in the dream) with utter clarity.

Something else I can tap into at any given time is the constant Existential Hum.  It is as if I have, in the "soundtrack" of my mind, a tone of Todesangst which toggles volume at divers and sundry points, but which is ever present.  Sometimes it's pounding like a bass drum, sometimes it's so high pitched that only dogs can hear it.  I would like to be able to say, "Come what may, it is well with my soul.  The timing is all.  I have no fear of death."  But that would be dishonest.  I don't have that kind of peace.  Death sounds awful to me.  It also looks awful to me.

When I become aware of the brevity of this life, I panic.  When I think of the likelihood of death as a simple extinguishing of consciousness, I am terrified.  When I think that this is happening constantly everywhere on the planet and that, in fact, walking consciousnesses effect that outcome on other walking consciounesses, I am horrified.  When I then consider the vastness of the human mind against the great insignificance of the entire Earth, a speck in vast space, I am crippled.

I've noticed a trend in certain types of churches, generally the more accepting and inclusive ones, of becoming a sort of psychic Intensive Care Unit.  Unfortunately, wolves and foxes are attracted to places where the smell of blood is strongest.  I have often remarked that I feel like an alien in my own religion and in the past year that seems to be transforming me into a Deconstructed Christian.  As much as I like to think of myself as one of God's little snowflakes, special and peculiar in my precious little experiences, I think I can see that this turn of events has emerged from specific external stimuli.  I know that I'm not the only modern (or, indeed, historical) person going through a similar long, dark night.  I know that this is a trend emerging in those whose doberman grip on their religion is keeping them attached to the edge of the cliff just as a florist district emerges in a major metropolitan area without any city planning.

In spite of the truth in Marx's assessment, I do not think that the primary function of a properly applied religious path is as an opiate.  However, I reject automatic deference to orthodoxy.  I have no interest in impressing my peers or dead white guys with my alignment with them on the issues.  I have no interest in impressing others with my religion.  My religion is simply my relationship with God and what that means to my behavior in this world.  I want to fellowship with other believers and have a free exchange of ideas.  I want to love my fellow human and honor my God in my behavior.  I do not care if a guy with a book published or sermons broadcast on the radio agrees with me on a point of doctrine that I've come to believe.  Having deconstructed my spiritual walk in the past year I find that I cannot reject the Gospel.  The most junior of analysts will probably make short work of reconciling this paragraph with the first two.

Let's take the afterlife, for example.  Popular Christian versions of the afterlife tend a little too close for my comfort to what I call "action figure religion."  As in there are places behind the curtain of reality called Heaven and Hell where people go and there are different places and beings.  Golden roads and pearly gates in front of which St. Peter stands behind a podium with a large book and so forth.  You could make a diorama of these places.  That sort of thing.

The Annihilationist view strikes me as more in line with an Old Testament understanding of the afterlife as well as being more in line with observable reality as I have experienced it.  The ignominy suffered by Sodom and Gomorrah lay in their destruction, their snuffing out of existence.  The hope and comfort of the Gospel is in the escape from the condition of life, being under the thumb of death, with the possibility of reconciliation with God and eternal life with same.  We are unable to restore what was broken.  We are all freeloaders at the Divine Feast and it required an act on the part of the divine to even let us in the room, much less give us access to free refills.

 I do think that one must needs retain an agnosticism over the afterlife as we do not have a complete set of stats.  The ancient Hebrews as well as the ancient Greeks were eyes deep in metaphor.  When I say "O, my love is like a red, red rose, that is newly sprung in June" I am not meaning to suggest that Laurie is of a burgundy complexion and that her face literally looks like a collection of petals.  It is entirely acceptable in language to employ devises to express a deeper meaning or a meaning not so easily expressed by the conventional employment of vocabulary.  Poetry exists to express those things which can only be expressed through poetry.

I have mentioned before that I don't buy the version of the Genesis creation account put forth by so many Christians that it is meant to be read as though it were a history textbook and that anyone who says otherwise is speaking heresy (and, therefore, going to Hell.)  The evidence seems to point fairly conclusively to the fact that the planet is upwards of 4 billion years old, which suggests to me that metaphor was being worked with in the writings of a member of an ancient civilization, one who was obviously and like all of us fettered by their space-time understanding of the universe, meant to identify God as creator and thereby set the stage for illustrating humankind's relationship to that deity.  Clinging tenaciously to the seven days in spite of all evidence to the contrary not only undermines the credibility of our religion to the eyes of the world, but more importantly, it misses the point.  Likewise, as I've said before, I don't think we know or can know exactly how the end of human existence will play out either from the data science has to offer or from eschatological scriptural passages.  Once again, I don't think the point of those passages was for us to make charts.  I think they were meant to point toward what a Christian ought to focus on and how they ought to behave.

The trend toward churches being ICU wards for the psyche is, I think, entirely appropriate.  Existence is extremely harsh and difficult to deal with.  Humans treat one another in abysmal ways.  God, in my experience and in the experience of so many others I've talked with, so often appears silent to us.  This agnosticism of the faithful, the fact that there is so much we do not and cannot know, is the major theme of the book of Job.  I would point out that Job is most likely the oldest book of the Bible.  So, when it came time for humankind to have divine revelation, that was the first message delivered.

The other night I was completely shaken by a line from a film Laurie and I were watching.  It was the film adaptation of the graphic novel The Watchmen and, at one point, the Rorschach character says to his prison psychiatrist in reference to his vigilante dealing with a child murderer "You see, Doctor, God didn't kill that little girl. Fate didn't butcher her and destiny didn't feed her to those dogs. If God saw what any of us did that night he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew... God doesn't make the world this way. We do."

So often I wonder why God seems to be okay with so many things that go on.  I also think so often about how this world can be whatever we make of it... and this is what we've chosen to make of it.  What does that say about humankind?  And, you see, this is part of why the need for Christ seems entirely plausible to me.  However, I don't think the belief leaving me waiting for the Deus Ex Machina to swoop down at the end of the play and save "the good guys" is the appropriate reaction to that information.  I don't think religion is the key to isolating one's self from people one dislikes, disagrees with, or simply fears out of extrinsic differences.  I find myself more in step with the axiom of the entirely pagan Marcus Aurelius who wrote:

“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” 

I walk around every day with the absurdity of existence strapped to my forehead, forever in my field of vision.  I understand the traditionally Freudian analysis of my alienation and sense of loss over the forgotten dreamtime glimpse behind the curtain.  I also know that I my brain might prefer hysterical misery to common unhappiness.  I say all of these things, but also still hold to the Gospel.  I still am a Christian and, I think, probably more earnest of one than I've ever been.  Certainly more than when I had all of the answers neatly arranged on a silver platter.  I think congregations would do well to be less surprised to find the dead and the wounded in the pews next to them and remember that they serve the Great Physician.

P.S. It seems that these "talking cure" posts about religion are turning into a regular addition to my blog.  Apologies to the hypothetical people who come to my blog for writing about literature.  I am finding this practice therapeutic.  I also hope that my healing path may occasion some comfort to other hypothetical people out there.

More fulfillment of my duties as a tea spokesperson

Oh my stars and garters!  My commercial for Earl Grey tea has occasioned people sending me gifts of tea in the mail.  THIS KIND OF BEHAVIOR IS HIGHLY ENCOURAGED! 

The tea above was a gift from my old friend Jessi Lijewski and arrived on my doorstep a few mornings ago.  Within the envelope was, as you can see, five types of tea.  I repaired to my kitchen and commenced brewing.

 My normal loose leaf Earl Grey brand is Twinings.

Twinings Earl Grey Tea, Loose Tea, 3.53-Ounce Tins (Pack of 6)

Twinings (pronounced as to rhyme with the sound that makes me avoid upper-class toy shops, not to rhyme with what Mr. Sheen claims to be doing all the time) is old, established, and traditional.  It's a 300 year old brand started by a tea merchant in London.  It has hints of citrus and a heady bergamot twinge.  I let it brew while I'm getting ready for work, splash in some cream, and drink it as I commute.  It's a pleasant way to start one's day.

If I were call upon to employ a musical metaphor, if Twinings were J.S. Bach, the Intelligentsia brand would be Erik Satie.  Both are elegant, astonishingly perfect in their technical blends without sacrificing one mote of beauty, and, in spite of their difference in time, somehow end up with undeniable similarities.  Oddly enough, the Intellgentsia brand was first known for its coffee, but has branched out to fine tea, while Twinings is known for its tea, but has lately branched out to fine coffee.

I enjoyed the Intelligentsia brand very much.  The citrus flavor is a bit more pronounced and the "nose" is fantastic.  The aroma richly infuses your kitchen as the leaves infuse the water.  It is a very exciting tea.

You can enjoy either tea in your own home by ordering them from their website or, indeed, wherever fine teas are sold.  I would highly recommend you do so.  I have an array of four other teas which I am looking forward to sampling.