I get great pleasure from accumulating information. This is just because I want to become a better person. I see myself as a great work of anti-art: I will try to become my ideal until I die, and then it will be for nothing more than the joy I had while doing it. Senseless beauty and random acts of kindness, my ass!
It was not the Bible that I was reading: it was Gary Taylor’s exquisitely fun Reinventing Shakespeare. I will be writing about it soon; I had to re-supply my stock of book darts because of this book. (I don’t get any money for that link; I just think that book darts are one of the greatest inventions ever.)
When I was in Mexico recently a few people asked me if I was a padre—”a priest” one helpful questioner translated for me. I like the idea of people thinking that I’m a man of the Word. Yes, it is true that my spiritual beliefs are what people charitably called atheistic. Yes, I am a hopeless moral relativist. Yes indeed, when my friends speak kindly of me, they say, “But he’s our nihilist.” All these things are true, but I have one thing that qualifies me to be a prophet: I am a man of the word—and most people don’t pay enough attention to notice issues of capitalization.
I believe people thought that I was a priest for three reasons. First, I am a gringo and I saw no other in my time down in the southern part of Mexico. Why would a sober white man be slumming it as I was? Second, I wear almost exclusively black. They seemed to associate that more with the clergy than with the Beat Generation. And third, I was studying a big, hard-cover book. They thought it might be a bible.
In these post-modern times, it does seem to be the case that adults do not read books. Those who do usually read relatively thin, paperback books. Large, hardback books are not read; they are studied. And in general, that is the case. There is usually a reason I am reading any given book—it isn’t just for pleasure.
For example, let’s look at today’s loot:
The Chicago Manual of Style 15th Edition This is definitely not light reading, but it is highly pleasurable—because I’m weird that way. I plan to wax poetic about it in my next blog entry.
The Works of Rabelais I am working on an article about anal cleansing, so of course I have to read Gargantua and Pantagruel. You do see that, don’t you?
Don Quixote (translated by Edith Grossman) and Don Quixote (translated by Charles Jarvis) In addition to these two translations, I have ordered four more. This all has something to do with something that ends in my reading Don Quixote in Spanish. That is to say that there will be more than one article involving this reading.
There is (more than?) an element of religious zealotry about all of this. I do want to bring the Word of Cervantes (indirectly via his translators) to the masses—or some subset. People ought to be warned, and if they mistake me for a man of the Word rather than a man of the word, that’s probably good enough.
More Don Quixote
Want to know more about Don Quixote and other 16th and 17th century literature? Check out my Don Quixote Page!
I have been looking for the perfect cream of tomato recipe for about ten years. I think I may be close with this one. Originally, the recipe was from Cooks Dot Com, but I have made some major improvements to it. Here is the base recipe:
Ingrediants
Two (2) tbs butter
One and a half (1.5) c chopped onion
One (1) tsp minced garlic
One-half (0.5) tsp salt
One (1) tsp minced fresh rosemary
Two (2) tsp minced fresh basil
One (1) tsp freshly ground black pepper
Two (2) 15 oz cans of peeled, diced tomatoes
Three (3) tbsp dry sherry
One-quarter (0.25) tsp agave (or honey)
Four (4) oz cream cheese
Heavy cream
Fresh parsley
Tasks
Pour the tomatoes in a large sauce pan and simmer on low. Stir occasionally. They are usually done by the time you prepare the onions, but I am a slow cook. It is better to over-cook the tomatoes, so start them early if you are an efficient cook.
Mince the rosemary. Or better: get out of the mortar and pestle. You do not want big chunks of rosemary in your soup; and the blending will not chop up these fine particles. Mince the basil; or not; it doesn’t so much matter with the basil.
Saute the onions and garlic in butter—at a lower temperature than you would normally cook when using (say) olive oil; the temperature should be low enough that you don’t have to worry about the butter turning brown or the garlic becoming the consistancy of bac-o-bits; I use medium-low to medium. When the onions start to get wilted, add the salt, mix, and continue cooking until the onions are transparent.
Add the rosemary, basil, and pepper to the onions and saute for five more minutes; or until the tomatoes are done.
Pour the contents of the onion pan into the tomato sauce pan. Mix the contents. Turn up the heat to medium-low. Cover the pan and simmer for about ten (10) minutes. Uncover and add the sherry and agave. Mix and test the soup. If it seems way off, add more agave, but don’t push it. Simmer another half-hour.
Cut the cream cheese into small pieces and add them to the soup, one by one. Make sure that the cheese is fully melted before moving on to the next one.
Transfer the soup into a blender in parts. Never fill the blender more than half-way, because the soup is hot and will likely expand when blended. Blend to a fairly fine consistancy, but don’t destroy it. Empty into a serving bowl.
Serve with heavy cream (to taste—a lot in my case) and top with parsley.
This may sound more complex than it is. I have put more instructions than most cooks would need. Basically, you just cook the stuff, throw it in a blender, and there you are: soup. And it is very good.
Rather than canned tomatoes, it can be made with over-ripe tomatoes you probably have around at the end of the summer. I wouldn’t recommend the kind of fresh tomatoes you find in the store most of the year. And it really isn’t worth paying for hothouse tomatoes.
Let me know if you try it.
The top Classical Realist painters seem to sell large canvas oils for upwards of a couple hundred thousand dollars. So the money isn’t bad, if you are very good—which you must be to create even workman-like paintings in this sub-field.
The Twilight of Painting is a reactionary book about how everything is going to hell these days. It was first published in 1945. And it was written by the great artist R. H. Ives Gammell. In fact, the book is not about how everything is going to hell—just painting. You see, Gammell started painting during the pre-WWII era and he found that his work was totally outside the Modernist main-stream of the time. He was firmly rooted in the Academic Art of people like William Bouguereau—another artist I admire.
I first discovered Gammell and the art movement he started—American Classical Realism—at the Maryhill Museum of Art. They have a small room with perhaps twelve paintings. I spent over an hour in that room. It was amazing. The exhibit did not just include him; it included his disciples—in particular, Richard Lack.
More recent artists in this movement are pursuing some interesting paths. Take, for example, Jacob Collins:
Or Michael Grimaldi:
Or Graydon Parrish:
This is amazing, beautiful work.
Gammell always thought that Realism in painting would come back. And it has. But not at the expense of abstract work. The worldwide environment for art has changed in the post-modern era. Since any notion of absolute reality becomes more and more distant, and frankly, intellectually childish, so does the dominance of any one school of art. This means fewer artists become rich, but many more can make a living. That alone is welcome progress. However, even more welcome is the wondrous diversity of the art world; we are all enriched.
This is actually a field within Social Psychology. In general, I am trying to avoid it these days, but the Wikipedia article on Illusory Superiority is really good. The most interesting thing I learned from the article is that people find any member of a group to be above the median of the group itself. Also: people rate themselves less better compared to specific individuals than to the abstract “average”. I think this has something to do with how we find it easier to empathize with a single individual than with a group—even a group of two. (Sorry that I don’t have a reference for this; I heard it on On The Media last week.)
Worse Than Average Effect
There is another effect—the opposite of Illusory Superiority: The Worse Than Average Effect. This is the tendency for people to under-estimate their chances of doing something that they think they have a very low chance of doing. For example, people tend to underestimate how likely they are to find a $20 bill on the ground during the next two weeks.
After writing this article (when I had read about the WTA effect, but did not write about it), I thought, “Yeah, right; that’s not going to happen to me.” It had happened: four years earlier, but I expected it to never happen again. While writing, I estimated my chances of finding a twenty in the next two weeks at about one-half of one percent. That meant that I should find a $20 bill on the ground every four years, so if my estimate was right, I was due.
It turned out that nine days later, I found a $20 bill on the ground. Freaky cool.
Actually, 93% of a sample of American drivers rated their skill in the top 50%. This is from a 1981 paper “Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers?” by O. Svenson in Acta Psychologica.
Many years ago, I was introduced to the snarky statistic that 80% of drivers believe they are above average. This annoyed me from the start. Initially, I thought it was just another useless statistic; its snarky meaning had to be explained to me, “You see—idiot—only 50% of drivers can be above average; so at least 30% of the people are fooling themselves!”
The statistic has the feel of an urban legend. It seems reasonable—but then such stories always do. In fact, it appeals to my prejudice (very common among the kind of people who would pass on such information) that people over-estimate their own skills and under-value those of others. Just like an urban legend. And, of course, there is no real reference, and one has to wonder who would pay to find out how many people think their driving is better than it really is. (It turns out that a number of people would; see the caveat at the end.)
The biggest problem is that the snarky aspect of this “fact” is incorrect. It is quite possible for 80% of a population to be above the average (mean). Just imagine if driver quality were rated on a scale of 0 to 100. Further, imagine that there were ten drivers with the following ratings: 0, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100. Clearly, the average would be less than 100 and so 90% of the population would be “above average”. (I’m slow, not stupid.) This is hardly a normal distribution, however. And you would think that driver ability would be a normal distribution, or something like it. (But maybe not; my father thinks that the road is filled with “idiots” and him.)
At this point, the worst case scenario is that someone comes forward with an actual study that shows, more precisely: 80% of drivers believe they drive better than the median. On its face, this cannot be factually true: 50% of a population must be above the median and 50% must be below; this is the definition of “median”. However, this too is a ridiculous claim and leads me to the whole point of this article.
What does it mean to be a good driver? We must know this before we can know if one driver is better than another. For one person, a good driver might be one who can control his car at high speeds. For another, it may be one who always drives the speed limit. Given that most people are rather good at the kind of driving they value—and thus practice regularly—it is surprising to me that only 80% consider themselves “above average”. [caveat]
People are foolish. And at least in political matters, people tend to under-estimate others. For example, Americans consistantly over-estimate how racist their neighbors are: almost always rating them as more racist than they rate themselves. But this is exactly the appeal of this little statistic: “I am not one of those silly people who think that their driving is better than it really is.” My driving, however, definitely is above average.
Yes, I know. But I like the asphalt metaphor; what can I say?
One could say that the justice system in the USA where prosecutors have most of the power and a career/financial interest in convicting the guilty and innocent is nothing but commerce. I will need to think another couple of decades on this issue.
I have long felt that Scott Turow taught me how to write a novel. In particular, I experienced an epiphany while reading his third novel Pleading Guity. It was probably just that it was the third novel of his that I had read, and that I had figured out his tricks. Although I have previously thought that Turow is a character-oriented writer, he is in fact a plot-oriented writer—clever and capable in his way. Regardless, he did not teach me everything I needed to know about writing a novel—it took me seven years and many aborted attempts to complete my first, deeply flawed and largely lost novel Camping on Asphalt. But I can say this for sure: Turow showed me how to trick the reader. And I am strip-mining that territory in my current work on Treading Asphalt. [Note]
I just read Turow’s sixth novel Reversible Errors. Here’s my review: it’s a Scott Turow novel. Other than that, I don’t want to go into all the reasons that this is an entirely workman-like effort, fiction by the numbers—the same numbers we have seen in his previous five novels. If you like his books, you will probably like this one. It annoyed me for a couple of reasons, but the main reason was its treatment of the romantic subplot. (Don’t worry, there are no real spoilers here, even though I talk about events at the beginning and end of the novel.)
The main character, Arthur, becomes involved with a woman who used to be a judge, but is no longer because she was convicted of taking bribes. This is pretty bad, because judges are supposed to come to just decisions and when justice becomes a bidding war, it becomes simple commerce. [Note] Arthur does not seem to have a problem with this, perhaps just because he has the hots for her. Fine. One nice thing about Turow is that he has always been willing to show that people over thirty have sex drives (often more explicitly than I would prefer in such a novel).
We know from the beginning, however, that the judge was really being bribed because some people in power knew that she was a heroin addict. When Arthur finds this out he does what pretty much all Americans do when they hear the word heroin: freak out. Thomas Metzger has written wonderfully on the history of perceptions of heroin from its invention to the present in The Birth of Heroin. As Metzger points out, the modern perception of heroin is as a dirty, evil “other”. And this is precisely why people like Turow approach it as though it were the worst thing in the world.
Arthur can deal with the judge committing felonies that have a direct effect on her job. But he can’t deal with her drug choices. A corrupt, drunk judge: yes. A junkie judge: no. The novel ends with the judge begging for Arthur’s forgiveness. Arthur gives it. But what Arthur really needs is a clue. As does Turow.