day 315: greenville

Some shapes and textures from Greenville, South Carolina.

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The day's reading:

• The New York Times
• The Washington Post
• The Great White Bear, Kieran Mulvaney
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan

Noted:

In the Arctic, diatoms crawl to the bottom of ice floes to ride out winter. When sea ice freezes, it expels much of its salt. The return of sunlight penetrates the ice, melting the bottom first. Because the ice is fresher water, less saline, the meltwater is fresher and floats atop the saltier seawater, and the diatoms float in this more salubrious solution and bloom in the light, going about their photosynthetic business.

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

In ancient Greece, the priests responsible for the slaughter (Priests! Now we give the job to migrant workers paid the minimum wage) would sprinkle holy water on the sacrificial animal’s head. The beast would promptly shake its head, and this was taken as a necessary sign of assent.

Day 314: Buddy Guy

From David Remnick's excellent profile in The New Yorker:

As he talks, he keeps his eyes fixed on the stage, where a young guitar player is strenuously performing an overstuffed solo on “Sweet Home Chicago.” In this club, you are as likely to hear that song as you are to hear “When the Saints Go Marching In” at Preservation Hall. The youngster is a reverent preservationist, playing the familiar licks and enacting the familiar exertions: the scrunched face, the eyes squeezed shut, the neck craned back, all the better to advertise emotional transport and the demands of technical virtuosity. It’s fair to say that Buddy Guy, having done much to invent these licks and these moves, is not impressed. The homage being paid seems only to embarrass him. He is generous to young musicians who earn his notice—he even brings them up onstage, giving them a chance to shine in his reflected prestige—but he does not grade on a curve. The tradition will not allow it. Guy turns away from the stage and takes another sip of his drink, Heineken diluted by a glass full of ice.

“The young man might consider another song,” he says.

Day 309: Roll the presses!

Publication day for The Man Who Signed the City. Head over to the Amazon of your choice, hand over a modest sum, and meet 21 remarkable people, including a deaf boxer, a painter of fish, an essayist who survived a violent stabbing in Crete, a pianist with a ruined and then reborn right hand, and the world's greatest jazz timpanist (in his own estimation).

Day 307: New York

Just back from four days roaming and shooting in New York City. I've not done that much street work and have much to learn. Here's a few of the better images.

Day 303: This is now a thing

Coming October 1 from 10,000 Days Press, The Man Who Signed the City. Available on Amazon next Tuesday. Not up for pre-order yet, but I'll let you know. Softcover print edition, $14.99; Kindle edition $3.99.

Day 298: Jesse Ball

We labor under tyrants. Sometimes we become tyrants ourselves. At present things look pretty grim. Some people like to look at the horrors of past centuries in order to paint a rosy picture of things today, but insofar as it is now possible for us to do better, and we are not doing better, things are quite bad. There is so much violence in the modern climate of reduced accountability—actions taken by millions of people simultaneously and trivially—that a different morality is needed in order for people to proceed in their day-to-day lives. If we ever needed Christian morality, and the answer to that is, I think that we never did (people could always be kind, whether Christian or no), then we do not need it now. People behaving generously in order to get a good deal later on in heaven is rather laughable, even if it is a swindle (no heaven). Why not instead behave to reduce the suffering of other living things without any reward but the life thus lived? And why not stop believing man is the center of the universe? That’s a small beginning.

Jesse Ball is author of the just-published The Divers' Game. His take is gloomy, but not off the mark.

Day 296: Farm Brains

”Part of the problem is, you’ve got a lot of D students left on the farm today,” Joel [Salatin, farmer] said, as we drove around Staunton running errands. “The guidance counselors encouraged all the A students to leave home and go to college. There’s been a tremendous brain drain in rural America. Of course that suits Wall Street just fine; Wall Street is always trying to extract brainpower and capital from the countryside. First they take the brightest bulbs off the far and put them to work in Dilbert’s cubicle, and then they go after the capital of the dimmer ones who stayed behind, by selling the a bunch of gee-whiz solutions to their problems.” This isn’t just the farmer’s problem, either. “It’s a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons.” — Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma

For the past two months, I have been reading and writing about the farm economy and regional foodsheds and the politics of how we eat. The more I read about and talk to small-scale organic farmers, the more impressed I am by their brains. Farming that produces high-quality food without chemical intervention and simultaneously builds soil, removes carbon, reduces use of fossil fuels, and subverts the massively destructive industrial food system requires acute observation, vast knowledge, and high intelligence. And guts.

Day 295: Turtle in Bhujangasana

Never know where you'll encounter a good cobra pose.