July 31, 2007
Poverty
It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
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July 30, 2007
Caleb Crain on a history of whaling in America
At first I thought Oh no! A review of a history of whaling in America! Then I read the lead of this piece by Caleb Crain, who is one of my favorite New Yorker writers, and laughed all the way to its conclusion. I learned a few things, too. Here's the opener:
If, under the spell of “Moby-Dick,” you decided to run away to the modern equivalent of whaling, where would you go? Because petroleum displaced whale oil as a source of light and lubrication more than a century ago, it might seem logical to join workers in Arabian oil fields or on drilling platforms at sea. On the other hand, firemen, like whalers, are united by their care for one another and for the vehicle that bears them, and the fireman’s alacrity with ladders and hoses resembles the whaler’s with masts and ropes. Then, there are the armed forces, which, like a nineteenth-century whaleship, can take you around the world in the company of people from ethnic and social backgrounds unfamiliar to you. All these lines of work are dangerous but indispensable, as whaling once was, but none seem perfectly analogous. Ultimately, there is nothing like rowing a little boat up to a sixty-ton mammal that swims, stabbing it, and hoping that it dies a relatively well-mannered death.
Click here for the rest of this review. (I also recommend his essay on Britain's Mass-Observation movement, published last autumn.) Crain keeps a blog, "Steamboats Are Ruining Everything," and this post details sources for his piece on whaling.
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July 19, 2007
Testing, testing. 1, 2, 3 ...
The beach at Greenwich, CT, June 2007.