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Annals of the Long Now

Among the interviews collected at the Paris Review site is a recent interview with John McPhee, where he allows that the sense of geological time he rubbed up against for twenty years creating Annals of the Former World (1998), associating with geologists who say a million years is the smallest plausible unit they can think in, has taken its necessary toll on his own perspective:

The fact is that everything I’ve written is very soon going to be absolutely nothing—and I mean nothing. It’s not about whether little kids are reading your work when you’re a hundred years dead or something, that’s ridiculous! What’s a hundred years? Nothing. And everything, it doesn’t evanesce, it disappears. And time goes on, and the planet does what it’s going to do.

Is That My Shoe You're Eating, Or Are You Just Glad to See Me?

Two idiosyncratic masters of filmmaking, Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, appear in conversation at the Toronto International Film Festival [via kottke]:



The rest of the lenghty interview, in four parts, can be found here.

My man Werner's charming, insistent, ingenuous bluntness would be tactless in a fellow who cared at all about such philosophical trivialities as tact when the precision of a sentiment is at stake.

Baseball (!!)

With 15 games left on the schedule, the San Francisco Giants (83-64) took over first place in the National League's West Division last night, demolishing the hapless Los Angeles Dodgers of Los Angeles 10-2. It's there to be found out in the forthcoming final two weeks of play whether this proves to be the high point of the season for the Giants or instead a local maximum on a path ascending to the global maximum of the Championship of Major League Baseball itself.

Any victory is sweet, and any victory over the Dodgers is sweeter, but especially a victory clinching this year's season series against what are surely, even to the dispassionate eye, a bunch of bums. "Well, the lads beat the Dodgers that year," is all the good that can be said to salvage the memory of many a season for the Giants, more's the pity, as all the club's fans are aware. But it  can be said of this season, now, at the very least. The Giants beat the Dodgers this year. Baseball has done some good again.

Baseball (!)

The Popular Game of Baseball

Sam offered me a ticket to tonight's Giants-Dodgers game at AT&T Park in San Francisco. Years ago, with my father and my mother's father, I went to a Giants-Dodgers night game at Seals Stadium. I don't remember how we got there, drove down Harrison and parked on some side street  maybe, or took a jitney down Mission Street and walked. Today I'll be taking the bus over Hwy 17 to San Jose's Diridon Station, and from there the train to AT&T Park.

So there we were, sitting high up above and well back from the field not too far down the right field line, a young guy named Sandy Koufax pitching a pretty steady game for the Dodgers into the ninth inning that night, the Dodgers sitting on a two-run lead when lo and behold a rally broke out and the Giants loaded the bases. Koufax was done. My grandfather, who brooked no dispute when it came to baseball matters,  begrudged, "This young guy's a good pitcher, Koufax" as Koufax walked off. Subsequent events proved the rueful truth of this judgement to all those who despise the Dodgers of Los Angeles. They brought in Art Fowler to face Leon Wagner, pinch-hitting for the Giants. Wagner, observing as he later put it that "the bags was bulgin'," stepped up to the plate and hit a grand slam home run into the right field stands that won the game for the Giants, 6-4. It remains to be seen what tonight's game has in store. Another wondrous victory for the Giants over the Dodgers would be fine by me.

Department of Unlikely A. mississippienses

Claude the Albino Alligator is 15 years old tomorrow. This is a picture of him from December of 2009. He's more than eight feet long now. I don't know how much that is in handbags. He lives in strictly observed comfort at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

Happy Birthday, you terrible thing.

The Boat Fished Out of the Sea

For a number of decades lots of boats (like the Santa Cruz, seen here parked on the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf) plied the waters of Monterey Bay and beyond, harvesting the rich established fisheries along the eastern shore of the Pacific Ocean. Agriculture, fishing, and the relict of the redwood lumber industry still gnawing away at the county's remaining hills and dales were the bastions of what local economy existed during those times in Santa Cruz. Fishing boats like the Santa Cruz helped boats from Monterey and elsewhere empty the waters of sardines as fast as the loggers could clip the hills of trees, and eventually there was hardly a sardine left to fish for, and like the loggers and millhands who dispersed, having little left to do once most of the forest had been seen to, the fleet of fishing boats tied up near the Wharf dwindled in number before relocating to the friendlier confines of an improved Harbor just down the coast, leaving the Wharf in the main to the customer-friendly uses of shops and restaurants.

My father knew a guy in Santa Cruz whose business was shrimp cocktail, packaging small shelled shrimp in little glass jars with some proprietary red sauce or other, cases and cases of the stuff he sold to grocery stores and delis, and handed out to pals when they showed up. I have a haze of a memory of going along on a visit to the guy one time in the earlier 1950's, Dad working the waif angle maybe to pry another carton of the things out of his pal. I've always wondered where they scraped the little shrimp up from, some nearby spot crawling with the things at the time, I suppose. Dad's pal worked out of a big warehousey sort of place hard by the old Union Ice Company's plant on Chestnut and Laurel streets in Santa Cruz. They don't do that sort of business near Chestnut and Laurel anymore, selling shrimp surrounded by some tomato-based something of a sauce in little glass cylinders. Whoever's selling shrimp, from wherever it comes from now, has another way to get it to market these days. And the Union Ice plant is long gone, the need for a facility to produce the vast quantities of ice demanded by the best practices of fishmongering on the enormous scale supported by all the fleets of boats identical to the "Santa Cruz" melting away years before the structure exploded and burned during the Loma Prieta quake in 1989.

The Reported Explosion

Within just a couple of hours, news cobbled together of the the explosion in San Bruno had gained the attention of the entire world. The BBC News RSS headline, linked to an article on its website, stated, inaccurately, Blaze engulfs San Francisco homes and continued, inaccurately, "Dozens of homes have been set ablaze near San Francisco International Airport, after a reported explosion."

Residents and travelers alike have long noted that San Francisco International Airport is not in San Francisco, but on the shore of San Francisco Bay miles south of the city. If the body of the RSS feed is accurate, and the blaze, caused by a reported explosion, caused dozens of homes near the airport to be engulfed in flames, then its headline is simply wrong, as there are no houses both in San Francisco and near its airport. Complicating matters, the actual homes set ablaze in San Bruno are not only not in San Francisco but not particulary close to the airport, either.

The BBC's RSS feed makes for a crude approximation of the event it points to. "San Francisco" BOOM! would do as well. But it's notable that even garbled word of this local catastrophe was reverberating in London less than three hours after the terrible explosion.

Argument: On History On

James Bridle has printed a collection of every edit made to the Wikipedia article "The Iraq War" from December 2004 to November 2009, amounting to 7,000 printed pages in twelve volumes on the arguable subject. No argument regarding the Iraq War, however blunted by the forces of fact and reason, however sharpened to its best possible point by the intercessionary fashioning of some later better way of saying it, is likely to have been skipped over lightly in this enormously lengthy public handling and mishandling of the article "Iraq War" on Wikipedia. So if at some later time some historian is at all interested in becoming immersed in what people were capable of saying about the Iraq War while it was going on in an effort to make some final sense of the matter which has eluded people up till now, here is a primary document without peer:

That Old Refrain

Some People Knew What
Nobody Could Have Known,
…Somebody's Been Seeing
My Maaaaaaan!

Yesterday marks the notional end of the ongoing American invasion of the famous Middle East of the planet which began more than seven years ago with a spectacular attack on Baghdad, the capital city of the justly reviled Sadaam Hussein regime. President Obama has now officially closed the books on the matter with an address from the Oval Office following the reshuffling this past week of the last U.S. combat troops remaining in Iraq to posts just outside the country.

Of course one of the object lessons of this now-officially concluded adventure is that the US is militarily "just outside the country" with respect to any country anyplace in the world, that it remains, on the evidence, quite capable of rapidly deploying overwhelming military advantage to a specified target virtually anywhere on the globe the President cares to finger for whatever reason, and to stay there and mix it up as necessary for as long as the President says.

For all the talk of what nobody could have known about the invasion of Iraq, it was certainly knowable by August of 2002 that the President had fingered Iraq, and that the US military would deliver a crushing blow to Iraqi society would make the Mongols look like a tea party, precipitating a generation-long engagement in military adventures in Iraq and elsewhere in Asia by the US, the first phase of which is just now, officially, strictly speaking, drawn to a close.