24 June 2009
I thought I’d buy a yogurt maker, but I couldn’t find one, so instead I googled “make yogurt” and followed the first instructions I found (which were these) in the laziest possible way. I ended up with excellent yogurt. The texture is perfect I think; but I’d like it sourer, so may let it go a bit longer next time. Screw yogurt makers.
Maybe I will try making cheese sometime?
Comments (1)22 June 2009
Here are the thoughts I had late last night.
You might have noticed that people like to believe things that are convenient to them. For example there are always these diet books coming out like How I Got To Look Like Summer Glau By Stuffing My Face With Pie, and a bunch of people buy these books and believe that they too can succeed with this method, not because of any evidence that it works, but just because they would like to stuff their faces with pie and also look like Summer Glau.
(I don’t mean to be sexist: the desire to look like Rafael Nadal works similarly. And this isn’t to say that some exotic diets might not work; I only mean that people’s interest in them is often unconnected to whether they work or not.)
That is only one example. People are doing this kind of thing all the time. For another example there are the works of Ayn Rand: a certain kind of person wants to be told that it is a noble thing to crush the weak, and so these works are popular. To this kind of person it all seems very reasonable, as though there could be no other conclusion.
I like Descartes’s Discourse on the Method. I remember reading it for the first time, maybe ten years ago. It is quick and clear and it seems to make a great deal of sense. Its thesis is that people think all kinds of things, but many of them are not true, and so what we need to do is forget all that former thinking, start out assuming nothing at all, and rebuild knowledge rigorously from the ground up. I like that idea (and I am not the only one), and I also admire the … is elan the word? with which Descartes dismisses all intellectual activity previous to himself.
It is in this work that Descartes says the famous thing that he said, “I think therefore I am,” the idea being, all this time he has been deciding that nothing is true and thinking various other outrageous thoughts, but then there must be some entity, which he calls himself, that is doing all this deciding and thinking, and so it is safe to say that this entity, at least, exists.
That’s the first conclusion he reaches, after assuming nothing: that he himself exists.
His next conclusion is that God exists. This argument, compared to the first, seems distinctly dubious to me, and I think to many other readers today. If you want to know more about it I will direct you to the original; but I want to note that it appears to be of a very different type from the first argument, and it is not at all clear that it belongs at the foundation of the structure of definite knowledge that Descartes is trying to build. It’s not unlikely that he wasn’t satisfied with it himself, but put it in only to mollify certain others; but regardless of why it’s there, it’s striking that, even in this document, which is devoted to reason and which lies at the heart of modern science, there is a claim that seems to us to come from a very different place and to be part of a very different world, but that is presented along with the rest as though it were all of the same.
That is, even at the beginning (to the extent that Descartes’s work is a beginning), we were using reason to demonstrate things that were convenient, and not necessarily things that were actually reasonable.
So the thought that I had, as I lay in bed last night, is that the real difference between the pre-modern and the modern eras is that, whereas then we were deceived by elites, now we are responsible for our own deception.
In a very general sense of course. Then the Church and other powerful groups would decide what was true based on their own interests; now we can more often decide based on ours. That doesn’t make most of the things we believe any more true, it only changes the agent of error.
True, it may give us a better chance of getting certain things right. We seem to know things for example about surgery and how to manufacture plastics that people did not know then, and that’s probably progress. On the other hand we might know less about other things; sometimes I wonder how much we have actually forgotten. Might it be good for us in some way to be compelled to believe things that we hate, and not allowed lazily to believe whatever we like?
After that I had strange dreams, and when I woke up it was cloudy again. I haven’t seen the sun for many days, even though yesterday was the solstice.
Comments (0)18 June 2009
I was weeding in the garden yesterday, but some of the things I planted are things I’ve never seen in their natural plant state before, and so I don’t know what they look like. I don’t actually know what a juvenile eggplant plant (?) looks like. So it might be that I uprooted the six eggplants long ago and am now carefully nurturing six weeds in the eggplant plot. In fact the idea is not unappealing to me: I would like to set aside a little patch of garden, choose one weed at random, clear everything else away, and raise that one weed as though it were the most important thing in my life. I wonder what the result would be.
Comments (2)10 June 2009
Got this from FC2:
It looks good I think, and also accurately reflects the contents of the book, if that makes any sense in this kind of situation. In particular, putting the stars in mosaic was pretty brilliant. Click for a bigger copy.
The book is due in Spring 2010. I still don’t know what the inside looks like — the design I mean. Obviously I know what the words say.
Comments (2)18 May 2009
Not much going on: classes have finished and now all I do all day is walk around and study Greek and wonder what to do next. And play Angband. (Sometimes I wonder if it is possible to write anything interesting about Angband for people who do not themselves play Angband. It occupies a remote intellectual space.)
That Wolfram Alpha thing is working now, if you want to have a look. It could not tell me which fonts Adrian Frutiger designed; apparently typography is not among its areas of expertise. It also does not seem to know who George Dalgarno was.
Today I came across Rollo Press, which I liked.
Rollo Press™ is a small print studio located in Zürich and is operated by Urs Lehni since the beginning of 2008. The only printing machine available is an old Risograph GR 3770. Rollo Press™ aims to produce printed matter with friends and accomplices in a way that includes all steps of the process: from concept to design on to printing, binding and distribution. It’s like in William Morris’ “Art and Its Producers”: To own the means of production is the only way to gain back pleasure in work, and this, in return, is considered as a prerequisite for the production of (applied) art and beauty.
I e-mailed to see if they (he) would accept Birkensnake 1 in trade for his latest.
Comments (1)11 May 2009
Today I was throwing away a bunch of stuff that had been sitting around, and I discovered a newsletter from the Central Church of Christ in Topeka, Kansas. This is the church where Michelle’s family goes; when we visited them at Christmas, I went there too. Somebody gave me this newsletter then, and I kept it because it features some psalms written by children, one of which includes the line, “God is like a triceratops because He protects all the day long.”
The other child-psalms in the newsletter compare God to a shepherd, a priest, and an eagle, all of which is fine I suppose, but it is because of the triceratops psalm that I kept this document and have now rediscovered it a thousand miles away in the springtime.
Comments (0)6 May 2009
Today I found a talon in the garden. I went up there just to make sure things were okay, and while I was there I pulled a few weeds. As I was about to leave, the talon caught my eye. It’s maybe two inches long, fingernail-colored, except the tip of it is coated in some kind of darker glossy stuff. It’s hollow. I brought it inside and washed the dirt off, then left it to dry on the drainer with my dishes.
It reminded me of one of my favorite first lines: “A boy was digging at the edge of the garden when he saw a big toe.” That’s from “The Big Toe,” which is the first story in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, by Alvin Schwartz. Some of the stories in that book are scary and some are not, but they are all made a billion times scarier by the illustrations.
After I found the talon, I went for a long walk down a dirt road and found a strange area I’d never been to before. It’s hard to explain this area, but there are some very steep hills and rotten trees and the concrete foundation of a small building, I can’t imagine what it was. This is in the middle of nowhere: I’ve walked down this dirt road a few times, and never seen anyone else on it. It’s not near a paved road. There was also a fire pit filled with screws (someone was burning carpentry debris I think) and one piece of charred rope.
I want to do something in this new area, but I don’t know what. While I was there, I forgot all about the talon. But I remember very clearly going to the top of one of the hills where there weren’t any trees, and looking all around, and then going down among the closest and rottenest of the close, rotten trees, where the ground was covered in thick moss, and looking up in the sky and seeing a hawk. That made me happy; I felt very alone in a kind of bewitched place and I was sharing it with this hawk.
And then just now I looked at the dish drainer and there is the talon.
That’s what happened today.
(Also, it is Michelle’s birthday. We potted some herbs and ate popovers, even though her oven is berserk and accidentally cooked the popovers at five hundred and fifty degrees until we smelled the smoke. They were not the best popovers, but many of them were still very good, and we had berries to go with them and talked about making ice cream in the summer.)
Comments (1)28 April 2009
Things are different here all of a sudden.
The past two nights, thousands of tiny mosquitoes have tried to enter my cottage. They think they can just come in through the cracks around the window frame and bother me, and they are almost correct — but I still have these shrinkwrap-style plastic sheets up inside the windows. The winter ended all of a sudden and I haven’t taken them down yet. So the thousands of mosquitoes come in the window-cracks, encounter the plastic sheet, and then just accumulate, buzzing, in the three inches or so of space between window and plastic. Seething masses of them. If I go outside and shine a flashlight around the windows I see that there are further seething masses of them all over the external window frames, just waiting to get in and try their hands. It is like the Amityville horror.
So far they have not been able to penetrate, but I would like to be able to take that plastic down someday and just have normal windows.
And that’s not all. During the day, wasps come in at the rate of one every two or three minutes. The screen door does not completely close, and somehow the wasps, like the mosquitoes, find it easy to enter through the cracks. They generally remain in the vicinity of the door, where I don’t mind them except for the buzzing. Sometimes they fly up to another window — one the mosquitoes haven’t yet discovered — and crawl through a tiny hole in the plastic (that’s how I know the mosquitoes haven’t discovered it, because they would actually be able to get in there), and then end up, again like the mosquitoes, in a no-man’s-land between plastic and window, from which they seldom can escape. There are now numerous dead wasps there.
In a different window, the same thing happens with moths.
I don’t know how all of this has been decided, that the mosquitoes will take these two windows and the wasps that one and the moths another. But they are thoroughly segregated.
In the garden, there are rows of tiny arugulas and Chinese cabbages. As of this moment I have ten tomato starts and five eggplant starts in small pots. I carry them out into the sun every morning and back inside every evening when it gets cool. I just looked at them, and it seems one of the tomatoes has grown about a quarter of an inch in the last hour. I will transplant them to the garden when they are stronger. I water them from an old salt shaker.
Last night I garnished my dinner with some of the chives that are growing like weeds in front of the cottage.
Also last night, about a quarter to one, I heard hoarse screams from nearby. It was frightening; I thought something must be wrong. I grabbed a flashlight, tried to think of a weapon I could bring, failed, picked up my cell phone instead, and discovered that the battery had died. So I went outside with just the flashlight. Another scream came, from a house a bit farther down the road it seemed. Nobody else was around and no lights were on. It was, as I said, the middle of the night. As I started towards the house, another scream came from the forest, an entirely different direction. I stopped. It had occurred to me before that they might be animal screams, but they didn’t sound like the screams of any animal I knew, and I’d never heard them before although I’ve been living here since September. But I also had never been besieged by mosquitoes before. Perhaps, I thought, these are just things that happen at the end of April, and different things will happen in May and June, and by the time we reach September again I will have forgotten all about these mosquito-swarms and screams of April.
I listened to the screams long enough to convince myself that they did indeed come from some kind of animal. Finally one of these animals seemed to be coming towards me in the dark (I couldn’t see it, but I could tell by its screaming), and I hurried back inside. I don’t know what kind of animal they were. It is not impossible that they were a bizarre kind of bird. Or canids maybe. I picture them as jackals, with lolling tongues and cunning eyes, but probably there are no jackals in West Kingston.
Comments (5)19 April 2009
Two dozen bottles. The bottling team also drank a great deal of it, even though it will not technically be “ready” for another six months at least. Oh, and now that I think of it, some people took a few bottles away. So really something in the neighborhood of thirty bottles.
Comments (2)18 April 2009
The moth is struggling heroically, but the spider seems to have him by the head. It’s a small yellow spider. I think he may actually be eating the moth headfirst while it continues to squirm. Animals are terrifying. This spider would think nothing of waterboarding.
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