Amour Propre

In Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, the title character is an American academic, fond of Paris, and prone to using French expressions. In one scene, he dismissively mentions some neighbours as self-satisfied bores, full of amour propre. Ravelstein was founded on Bellow’s friend Allan Bloom. Bloom after having studied and taught in Paris, was a life-long francophile. Amour propre was an idiomatic expression in Western Europe when Bloom taught in Paris. The English term would probably be snob, although dictionaries translate and define amour propre as conceit or excessive pride.
Bloom was a student and teacher of the works of Rousseau. Bloom favoured the cautious liberalism of Montesquieu over the Romantic liberalism of Rousseau, but he admired Rousseau’s passion. Rousseau understood, as Bellow has put it in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, that

The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natural knowledge. It sat unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly.”

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Mars and Venus, Anon

A short entry, a link to an address to the American Psychological Association, last month, by Roy Baumeister, called “Is There Anything Good About Men?”. Denis Dutton, one of the editors of AL Daily  posted it to his own web site and linked to it from AL Daily. It asks questions about some of the central myths of our culture – that women are naturally wise and benevolent and naturally better parents and friends than men.

About AL Daily

Art & Letters Daily has one of my favourites for as long as I have been writing A Sea of Flowers, largely for the reasons mentioned by Robert Fulford in his columns in the National Post January 22, 2002 and June 27, 2007.
On any given day, it is the gateway to well-written, reasoned commentary about things that matter in the life of the mind – language, literature, and thought. Over the course of few days, the editors added links to stories and essays about the decimation of book reviews from American newspapers by Steve Wasserman, the decline of literary journalism by Morris Dickstein, and James Wood’s move to the New Yorker.
The Wikipedia Entry spends some time on the question of whether AL Daily is conservative, as that term is understood in America, or libertarian. I think the editors like to report on the ideological or culture wars but are detached from the passions that drive the debate. I wouldn’t say that they are independent, but I am not sure what constitutes bias in the study of facts and events. They are loyal to keen observation and sound argument.

Sir Joseph Banks

Through the SciTech Daily site, a link to “Master of the Enlightenment”, Andrea Wulf’s review of The Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765-1820, edited by Neil Chambers.
Sir Joseph Banks was Patrick O’Brien’s model for Stephen Maturin, a leading character in the Aubrey & Maturin novels. O’Brien drew on Banks in two ways. In real life, Banks was 50 years old by the time Napoleon came to power in France, and a man of influence in European science. Sir Joseph Blaine, a senior man in British Intelligence who is as interested in Maturin’s entomological specimens as his information on political affairs. Banks’s journey with Captain Cook serves as model for Maturin’s scientific explorations during his travels a naval surgeon.
In the movie, Master and Commander, Maturin has one his scientific raptures in the Galapagos, implying that Maturin could be modeled on Charles Darwin. HMS Beagle was build after the end of the Napoleonic wars, and Darwin’s voyage (1831-1836) was specifically devoted to scientific and geographical information. Darwin was closer to Huxley and the practical scientists of the British Empire than to the scientists of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution.

Therapeutic Man

Around the time that I was reading Christopher Lasch’s books, in 2005, I saw a few interviews with Philip Rieff at AL Daily. There is a long, penetrating essay about Dr. Rieff’s work by George Scialabba, “The Curse of Modernity, Philip Rieff’s problem with freedom” in the Boston Review. Much of Rieff’s work involved the continuing reevaluation of the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber and Freud into religion as a social force. In Rieff’s 1959 book on Freud, he suggested, in Sciallaba’s words:

Until the twentieth century … three character types had successively prevailed in Western culture: political man, the ideal of classical times, dedicated to the glory of his city; religious man, the ideal of the Christian era, dedicated to the glory of God; and a transitional figure, economic man, a creature of Enlightenment liberalism. Economic man believed in doing good unto others by doing well for himself. This convenient compromise did not last long, and what survived of it was not the altruism but the egoism. Psychological man was frankly and shrewdly selfish, beyond ideals and illusions, at best a charming narcissist, at worst boorish or hypochondriacal, according to his temperament.

There is some force to some of these ideas.

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Upgraded to MT 4.0

Another half a year, another upgrade.

The installation instructions suggest untarring on the server and installing the files on the server.  I know how to install by FTP, and that’s what I did. 

MT says it has the best documentation of any blogging software. I
suppose it does, given how sparse the documentation on Open Source software can be. They still take things for granted. Thousands of users may know how to untar on in the server, and where to unpack the files, and how to move them to the mt-static and cgi-bin/mt folders.  Thousands must know how to effect a fresh install on the server.  It’s still all geek to me.

I have started to use the new features, and started to change several templates and then to apply a new layout and style.  A few hours later, I think it’s working decently. The style (at this moment) is called Portland.

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Victoria Dragon Boat Festival 2007

Team Loco Motion won silver medals in the Pearl event in the 2007 Victoria Dragon Boat Festival.  Our coaches and the experienced paddlers had tried to explain how this would work, but it wasn’t real until I experienced a big festival. Now I understand why people stay with this sport. I saw our team work hard, compete with enthusiasm, overcome adversity, lift its spirits, support our friends and mentors in the Club, and applaud our competitors.

Loco Motion had some extroverts and natural clowns, who took the Loco
name as a mission statement to have fun and create some entertainment. 
We had funny hats, songs, pranks. 

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Tap Water is Safe Clean and Green

Is the sale of bottled water one of the great triumphs of marketing? When it turns out that Aquafina sells filtered tap water, what is the value of buying bottled water, as opposed to tap water, or filtering your own water?
Buying many high end bottled water brands appeals to snob value – the idea that we should pamper ourselves and that our tastes are more refined than mass tastes. To some extent, that applies to any bottled water. Modern marketing has a way of making everyone feel they are the best sheep in the flock.
“Kick the Bottled Water Habit” is an extract from Tom Standage’s new book, A History of the World in Seven Glasses.
Standage is a little too kind to public water supply. It isn’t always safe, and it often has a smell or taste, associated with the source, or with the level of chlorination, or with sitting in old cast iron and lead pipes before it reaches the tap. Seattle has good water. Winnipeg used to have good water, drawn from the bottom of a Canadian Shield lake, but algae growth in the reservoirs, aging aqueduct and water main infrastructure and chlorination means that in July, August and September, tap water smells like the contents of a leaf filled swimming pool. But you can get rid of that by running it, letting it stand and pouring it into a container for drinking water, or by filtering it. So go figure what the convenience of buying bottled water is worth.
That’s a nice thing to be worried about in the first world. What about the third world? Leaving aside the anti-corporate rhetoric, clean safe water is huge issue. I want to see that movie Thirst some time.

Vancouver Island – Gorge Races – 2007

After about two months of practice, VCKC Loco Motion made its debut in the Vancouver Island Island Championships, at the Gorge Rowing and Paddling Center. In the first heat, we were put in against Blu by U, a competitive team that finished 8th overall on the day, came in at 2:14. We were second at 2:33. This got us into the Green event. Our performances improved through the next two races partly through the influence of wind and tide, to 2:17, but the competitive teams ran between 2:01 and 2:05 in their finals. The difference between a serious competitive mixed team and a novice team seems to be about 15 seconds.
I can see what this sport is about now. A novice team can’t seriously challenge a top team, but the race sorts itself into events that are challenging, competitive and rewarding. It rewards teamwork over individual effort. The boats weigh half a ton empty, and it takes 20 paddlers, working together, in time, with intensity, to move them.

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The Wild Trees

Richard Preston recognized a good story when he heard about Steve Sillett, ninja climbs and the quest for the tallest tree. He told the story effectively in “Climbing the Redwoods”, written for the New Yorker (ninja version here), and republished in Best American Science Writing 2006. He has managed to write it again, even better, as a full book, The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring. [Update – September 5/07. See “Upwardly Mobile” by Robert Macfarlane in the Guardian, September 1/07 for review of other books about climbing trees.]

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