moral messages no power to be enforced offer suggestions?
For some reason, with all the noise about bills and infrastructure and entitlements and progressives and what else you might have contributing to the static, William Magear Tweed has been on my mind.
Better know as ‘Boss’ Tweed, notable for being the “boss” of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party political machine that played a major role in the politics of 19th-century New York City and State according to Wikipedia.
He is the feller who said, “As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?”
Offer suggestions?
Today’s haiku is adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:
Architecture may well possess moral messages; it simply has no power to enforce them. It offers suggestions instead of making laws. It invites, rather than orders, us to emulate its spirit and cannot prevent its own abuse.
According the The New York Review of Books, this is “A perceptive, thoughtful, original, and richly illustrated exercise in the dramatic personification of buildings of all sorts.”
What I find irrestible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.
I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.
sadness we would face left ourselves open beauty’s many absences
Adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:
It is to prevent the possibility of permanent anguish that we can be led to shut our eyes to most of what is around us, for we are never far from damp stains and cracked ceilings, shattered cities and rusting dockyards. We can’t remain sensitive indefinitely to environments which we don’t have the means to alter for the good – and end up as conscious as we can afford to be. Echoing the attitude of Stoic philosophers or St Bernard around Lake Geneva, we may find ourselves arguing that, ultimately, it doesn’t much matter what buildings look like, what is on the ceiling or how the wall is treated – professions of detachment that stem not so much from an insensitivity to beauty as from a desire to deflect the sadness we would face if we left ourselves open to all of beauty’s many absences.
According the The New York Review of Books, this is “A perceptive, thoughtful, original, and richly illustrated exercise in the dramatic personification of buildings of all sorts.”
What I find irrestible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.
I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.
sense fragility of achievement few such days comes before the grief
Adapted from the book, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:
Still, I recognised the fragility of the achievement behind the lounge. I sensed how relatively few such halcyon days there might be left before members of the small fraternity ensconced in its armchairs came to grief and its gilded ceilings cracked into ruin. Perhaps it had felt a bit like this on the terraces of Hadrian’s villa outside Rome on autumn Sunday evenings in the second century AD, as a blood-red sun set over the marble colonnades. One might have had a similar presentiment of catastrophe, looming in the form of the restless Germanic tribes lying in wait deep in the sombre pine forests of the Rhine Valley.
Part of the series of Haiku inspired by from A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton. I discovered this book entirely by accident. When searching for books online, I will use the term ‘collections’ and see what turns up. I figure that someone who has taken the time to gather together the etexts of any one author to create a collected works folder is enough for me to see what this author might be all about.
In this case I came across the writing of Alain de Botton. I enjoyed his use of language very much. Much of the words he strings together lend themselves to what I do.
As for his book, I recommend it very much though written in 2009, it misses the added layer of travel under covid but still the picture of the modern airport is worth the read.
phone home ask for self fortunately discover relief you are out
When in need of a reality check, I call myself and it a relief to learn I am busy.
Or that my phone is busy.
Or that I am too busy to answer the phone.
Or that I am not there to answer my call at all.
It is a trick I learned from James Thurber.
In the preface to My Life and Welcome to It, Mr. Thurber writes, “I have known writers at this dangerous and tricky age to phone their homes from their offices, or their offices from their homes, ask for themselves in a low tone, and then, having fortunately discovered that they were “out”, to collapse in hard-breathing relief.“‘
THe columnist Alistair Cooke wrote about being out with Groucho Marx.
Waiting to be seated in a restaurant, a lady stopped Mr. Marx and said, “Might you be Groucho Marx?”
“Waddya mean, would I be Groucho Marx? I am Groucho Marx. Who would you be if you weren’t yourself? Marilyn Monroe, no doubt.
Sadly they cannot attribute either statement to Mr. Twain.
So I have to now say, “… as Mark Twain is reported to have said …”
Spelling has been on my mind of late.
Over the weekend last (Sept 25th) a member of the Ohio State football team quit the team in the middle of the game and took to Twitter to give vent to his feelings.
The story I saw reported that the player, K’Vaughan Pope, “tweeted ‘… Ohio State’ (expletive deleted AND misspelled).” [sic]
I had to laugh.
I mean it has long been known in the online world that I live in that any story about Ohio State football gets twice as many page views as any other any sports story.
The Ohio State fan who clicks on the story.
And the person who reads it to them.
That an Ohio State football player couldn’t spell a deleted expletive … was really funny.
Most expletives that get deleted are four letter words.
Just four letters.
I admit I had to puzzle out what Mr. Pope might have tweeted and it wasn’t until the next day that I came across a screen grab that showed that he tweeted ‘fucc Ohio State.’
Picking on athletes for their intellect is as old as any game.
James Thurber writes in the short story “University Days‘ of the entire class body, Professor included, working with a star football to name a form of transportation.
The scene is captured in Thurber’s sketch of Bolenciecwz trying to think.
Another course that I didn’t like, but somehow managed to pass, was economics. I went to that class straight from the botany class, which didn’t help me any in understanding either subject. I used to get them mixed up. But not as mixed up as another student in my economics class who came there direct from a physics laboratory. He was a tackle on the football team, named Bolenciecwcz. At that time Ohio State University had one of the best football teams in the country, and Bolenciecwcz was one of its outstanding stars. In order to be eligible to play it was necessary for him to keep up in his studies, a very difficult matter, for while he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter. Most of his professors were lenient and helped him along. None gave him more hints, in answering questions, or asked him simpler ones than the economics professor, a thin, timid man named Bassum. One day when we were on the subject of transportation and distribution, it came Bolenciecwcz’s turn to answer a question. “Name one means of transportation,” the professor said to him. No light came into the big tackle’s eyes. “Just any means of transportation,” said the professor. Bolenciecwcz sat staring at him. “That is,” pursued the professor, “any medium, agency, or method of going from one place to another.” Bolenciecwcz had the look of a man who is being led into a trap. “You may choose among steam, horse-drawn, or electrically propelled vehicles,” said the instructor. “I might suggest the one which we commonly take in making long journeys across land.” There was a profound silence in which everybody stirred uneasily, including Bolenciecwcz and Mr. Bassum. Mr. Bassum abruptly broke this silence in an amazing manner. “Choo-choo-choo,” he said, in a low voice, and turned instantly scarlet. He glanced appealingly around the room. All of us, of course, shared Mr. Bassum’s desire that Bolenciecwcz should stay abreast of the class in economics, for the Illinois game, one of the hardest and most important of the season, was only a week off. “Toot, toot, too-tooooooot!” some student with a deep voice moaned, and we all looked encouragingly at Bolenciecwcz. Somebody else gave a fine imitation of a locomotive letting off steam. Mr. Bassum himself rounded off the little show. “Ding, dong, ding, dong,” he said, hopefully. Bolenciecwcz was staring at the floor now, trying to think, his great brow furrowed, his huge hands rubbing together, his face red.
“How did you come to college this year, Mr. Bolenciecwcz?” asked the professor. “Chuffa chuffa, chuffa chuffa.”
“M’father sent me,” said the football player.
“What on?” asked Bassum.
“I git an ‘lowance,” said the tackle, in a low, husky voice, obviously embarrassed.
“No, no,” said Bassum. “Name a means of transportation. What did you ride here on?”
“Train,” said Bolenciecwcz.
“Quite right,” said the professor. “Now, Mr. Nugent, will you tell us–“
Bolenciecwz trying to think.
Shoeless Joe Jackson of Field of Dreams fame was famously uneducated.
One story has a fan yelling, “Hey Joe, can you spell CAT?”
And Joe yells back, “Hey Buddy, can you spell S H * T?”
Patrick Ewing of the New York Knicks (and maybe more famous for his years at Georgetown) was reportedly unable to spell ESPN unless you gave him two letters.
Never the less, today, in the age of twitter I find it a bit disingenuous on the part of the world at large and the sports world in particular to take on anyone over spelling.
Take me, for one.
I couldn’t spell my way out of a paper bag.
If my life were to be graded on spelling I wouldn’t make the list let alone the bottom of the list.
AND … don’t forget, Mr. Pope was so upset he had to TWEET before he could anything else!
The extent to which I can rely on my opposable thumbs to hit the right letters while texting or tweeting is not something I would ever want to be graded on.
Spelling in the age of social media may be having the legs of its seat at table of required talents being sawn off as we speak.
On the one hand, of course we want to be pretty specific with the written word.
On other other, don’t we all know what was meant to said?
In his book, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, the somewhat discredited and so I question my need to quote him but, Stephen Ambrose, writes about Lewis and Clark on the spelling of the word, mosquito, that, “His [Lewis] usual spelling, repeated at least twenty-five times, was “musquetoe.” Clark was more inventive: he had at least twenty variations, ranging from “mesquetors” through “misqutr” to “musquetors.”
The word Mr. Ambrose uses to describe the spelling of Lewis and Clark is ‘imaginative.’
Which circles back to Mr. Twain.
Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination.
Whether or not Mr. Twain said this and if he didn’t say I would bet he would have wanted to say it.
No Haiku For You 