Author: Don

Vintage port

Congratulations to Robbo on fifteen years of The Port Stands at Your Elbow. You might want to put another bottle of fortified wine aside for November, when he will celebrate a full twenty years of blogging at TPSaYE and earlier at The LLama Butchers. A year ago I linked to a couple of his whimsical LLB pieces, well worth reading like most everything else at all his websites.

Congratulations to Robbo also with his success with the cup plant, Silphium perfoliatum, a nine-foot-plus relative of the sunflower. I’d like to grow it myself in the arid reaches of my backyard, but it prefers more water than I can conveniently give it.1

Today’s question

Richard Hanania:

On what basis did we as a society decide that the ideal way to spend a childhood was to attend government institutions 5 days a week, 7 hours a day, 9 months a year, for 12 years? That most of that time should be spent sitting at a desk, with say one hour for lunch and one for recess?

(Via Isegoria.)

Joseph Moore has a notion why that happened. (Moore has quite a bit to say about modern education on his website, all of it worth reading.)

Hot stuff up north

The Reykjanes peninsula in southwest Iceland was quiet for 800 years, but it’s awake now. The third eruption there in as many years has begun. I’m suspending my “no YouTube” rule this once to post this video of the eruption’s beginning. For more information, check the recent posts and comments at Volcano Café.

Update: See also here.

Update IIb: This eruption is over, but there’ll be more soon.

Update III: The Greatest Show on Earth:

Chickens, dogs, banjos and bagpipes

Alan Arkin died a few days ago. You can find plenty of encomiums to this unique, legendary, etc. artist online3. Back in 1958, long before Peter Falk yelled “Serpentine” at him, he wrote a minor classic science fiction story, “People Soup.”4 You can read it here.

***

There’s an exhibition of Komar & Melamid’s art in New Jersey. I’d like to see it, but it’s a bit far to pedal. I wrote briefly about the duo here. The New Criterion article, worth reading though it is, omits one noteworthy project of theirs, a collaboration with composer David Soldier to produce examples of the “most wanted” and “least wanted” pieces of music. The “most wanted” song is inevitably drivel that not even Vernon Reid’s guitar can redeem, but people do like drivel, as I constantly rediscover. The “least wanted” song, however, is simultaneously wonderful and horrible and is worth hearing all the way though at least once.

Slow down

Ted Gioia echoes R.A. Lafferty:

IT’S OKAY TO READ SLOWLY

I tell myself that, because I am not a fast reader.

I can do speed reading, if it’s absolutely necessary—but I find it painful and exhausting. My natural reading pace is languid, almost lethargic.

My lifetime reading plan has been my proven path to Nirvana
Even more to the point, the books I read must be savored and slowly digested. Proust is one of my favorite authors, but I could only handle his ultra-dense writing in small doses. So I read through his 2,000-page novel at the pace of seven pages per day. I started when I was a teenager, and got to the final page shortly before my 30th birthday.

Of course, I read many other things during that period, but I always came back to his massive book—taking it slowly, thoughtfully, in the way it deserved.

For many years, I felt that my slow reading was holding me back. I would be wiser, I would be smarter, I told myself, if I could just read faster. I often keep going back over the same sentences again and again, trying to decipher their inner meaning. This slows me down to a tortoise’s pace—and it’s frustrating.

But now I believe slowness was a benefit. My learning was deeper and more mind-expanding because I didn’t rush it.

By the way, I did the same thing when I learned jazz piano. I spent months learning things that could have been mastered in days. But by the time, I was done, I had internalized my learning at a deep level.

Life is not a race. The journey is its own reward. If we could make the trip instantaneously—like they do with those teleporters in Star Trek—it wouldn’t be worth anything.

See Lafferty’s “The Primary Education of the Camiroi.”