Maggie's Farm

About beauty and kitsch and Scruton's new book on Beauty. One quote:

...if nearly everyone likes it, how bad can it be? "Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations," said Harold Rosenberg, the great art critic. Milan Kundera argued, "No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition." And they were writing before the appearance of "reality" television, which repackages kitschy old conventions of popular drama as public competition, bringing to "real" people the humiliation and cruelty traditionally endured by imaginary losers in mass-culture fiction.

Photo: Flamingo decoys are still available, here.

A friend emails this note:

I just finished reading Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich. He has an awesome born again story. If any of the guys in your Bible study like sports, it’s a good biography of a miserable superstar athlete who found his ultimate freedom and happiness in Christ at the end of his short life—and was able to pass it on to his father.

http://www.amazon.com/Pistol-Life-Maravich-Mark-Kriegel/dp/0743284976.

Thanks, Reader.

Our own new metal signs will say "Warning: You are entering the MF Assault Rifle Range at your own risk" That ought to work for everybody but the deer hunters who are half in the bag at 4 AM and do not give a damn. We considered having "You are being monitored by video camera," but that did not seem country style. Too much like England - and a lie, too.

Story at Rug Rag

New Canaan, CT, is known for the residential architecture of "the Harvard 5." Video.

Photo: The Bridge House

Our shrink friend Nathan, who has completed Aliyah in Israel, sends this reminiscence of his days working for the Indian Health Service, doing general practice including surgery and obstetrics - and anything else that was needed. Old-timey medicine.

Before replacing the sloughed skin on Mrs. R's arm, I had to find out why her forearm was raw to the muscle.  New here among the Sioux, I am surprised to learn that my colleagues (and one ancient Roman Catholic always fiddling with her rosary) hadn't checked this elderly, chunky widow's blood sugar: diabetic, sure enough, never diagnosed. So, first things first: stabilize her blood sugars, treat the diabetes, and give proper antibiotics (for anaerobes and aerobes -- they missed this too), then when you see the shiny, glimmer of healthy tissue margins, go for a skin flap transplant.

The pharmacist was my surgical assistant; he was the brightest of the bunch, from N'orlins, La before the Flood, he couldn't get into med school, he said, but he was smart, hard-working and pleased to assist. He also ordered special hickory chips from N'orlins, La. to barbecue and made his own roux. It was then that I learned I loathed ochra, that slimy matrix it exudes.

Then how to unskin a lady was not to be straightforward as it was at the University hospital where I studied.  The surgical suite -- well-endowed -- had not been used for years; surgery was sent eighty-miles up-road to Mobridge to the White hospital; none done here, except deliveries (which too often evolved into C-sections who had to be sent, ambulance screaming, up to Mobridge.  One trip, the eternally-soused obstetrician kept his fist in the mother's vagina to keep the baby from popping out.

To unskin a forearm means to find a donor site from the inner thigh. Anesthesia needed for this and there was no anestheiologist, no nurse-anesthetist, even in the 1970's. I do double duty. First, a lumbar block to numb the donor site; second, a brachial plexus block -- in the armpit -- to numb the recipient, the naked forearm.  Lumbars I had done many of: babies with possible meningitis; Southside Chicago girls in active labor, with no prenatal care and needing an urgent C-section.  But, brachial plexus block was a never-done for me; remembered the anatomy, the complex twistings and routings within that armpit, like some noodling of telephone wires beneath the city streets, but never stuck a needle there.  The night before surgery, I bone-up on my Netter's anatomy and hit the spot square-on the next day in the O.R. 

Before hitting the OR, I had done several days debriding of the sloughed wound: fresh it must be to transplant the sod of skin.  In the OR, flipped on her side, I slid into the vertebral space between L4 and 5; a bit lordotic pull by the nurses and I had a clear tunnel in.  Then, flapped on her back, Mrs R. was ready. The thigh well scrubbed, Betadined, aproned, an oval hole isolating the site. Instruments we had. The strange loopy-scalpel to slice just-thick-enough epidermis and a touch if dermis to both "take" to the new site, yet leaving some dermis to heal-over the thigh; something like a large cheese knife the instrument looked.  Forearm next. Her arm flung up like some lop-sided angel wing, I probed left-handed with two gloved fingers, then slid the massively long needle --- like from the cartoons -- in between the stretch of skin. Wait. Wait. Numbness without paralysis in the arm. First, a touch on the skin (for sensitive fibers); then a pinch with a forceps (for the pain C-fibers) and success. 

Laying the layers onto the site is much like laying sod; carefully, side by side, the edges trimmed to the wound shape. The "root" growing will take on its own, a pressure bandage holding the skin sod in place.  A fine lawn it will hopefully be; like sodding around a putting hole -- it should look good and cover the ground.  And after five  or six days of brief peeks, it looks darn good.

But, Mrs. R. wants a pass to leave early. There will be a Sundance ceremony with several initiants, including, I learn later, Russel Means, wanted by the FBI for shooting three men on Rosebed reservation, down south.  I explain, I plead in fact, that she can't rotate the arm; she must stay in hospital a week or so until we know healing has happened. Mrs. R. has donated two buffalo for eats at the ceremony and insists, politely, quietly, firmly, that she is going. Wakantanka, the Sioux god whose voice one hears shushing through the Black Hills, will protect her.  She invites me. 

Being invited was one thing; getting in another.  I and Debby were the only washichus, white men, attending. While this was a Lakota Sioux ceremony, it had become politicized; other tribes, mostly the more militant ones, as far away as the Navajo, had sent "guards": thick-armed toughs with long, greasy black hair and their image of mean on their faces. The fellow who greeted us -- we had the red Fiat 128 in South Dakota -- commanded us out. A face like a slab of steak with two eyes embedded, he frisked me; looking for drugs and guns, he said. His compatriots searched the tiny Fiat's baggage, checked under the carriage, beneath the seats, glove compartment. When he turned to frisk Debby, I told him firmly, no way: I would turn around and he could explain to Mrs. R. why I was not admitted. Her name was a key to the lock that was his harshness.  We were passed through. 

I did not expect to be the only Washichu; thought other docs would be invited; learned later that my do-gooder colleagues who come to save the Indians are not so welcome.  Already, I had dispensed with making morning rounds with them, as I tired and was irritated at the "religion" they spouted at bedside; told them I needed to round earlier.

We formed a large  circle. Formed is not quite right. A circle was somehow formed by the few hundred there, centered by the cottonwood from which leather strops hung. Each strop was anchored with a bone hook -- from what animal I don't recall, perhaps antelope.  The six piercees entered; I'm told by Mrs. R. that they had purified themselves in the wild for several days with fasting and water.  The hooks are pierced into the pectoral muscle, not the skin, to hold more firmly; one on each side.  as the men leaned back against the leather thongs, faces skyward, Cubist, uptilting tits were formed: this manly ceremony giving rise to a touch of woman.  A moaning or humming was emitted by them by these men; also those in the circle, as the men stomped sidewise about, a dance they called it, in a hypnotic slowness. A timeless quality it felt.

Near the end, several men appear with massive shallow wooden bowls, face us in the circle and pass around the dried buffalo donated by Mrs. R.

She is called to near the center. A peace pipe is to be given to her for her generosity. As some chiefly type raises the pipe, his arms extended, palms upward, I realize, a touch shocked, that she will now rotate her arms upward to receive the peace pipe with both hands. I feel a belly clutch: will she tear the stitches?

Mrs. R. looks back at me afterwards; tosses a smile of reassurance. Thanks to Wakantanka the skin is fine, she explains.

One weekend, we go to the Black Hills, find a cabin, rest outside beneath a sky filled with more stars than I have ever imagined. I feel a sense of annoyance as I hear the rush of what sounds like highway traffic just beyond the ridge.  Ridge top I look: no highway; it is Wakantanka speaking through the black pine. 

It was the only time He has ever spoken around me.

Top photo: Sioux war party, 1870s?
Middle photo: Sioux warrior
Lower photo: Sioux village

Our blog pal AVI noticed a fascinating piece at Steve Sailer about the relative popularity of art posters.

Is it all about color-coordination? Decor? An important artist whose posters do not sell, Max Ernst's Europe After the Rain (1940):

"Ancient," to me, means before 1000 BC. After that, it's historic, more or less.

These are old pots. I stumbled on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's site with their collection of Athenian 6-4th Century BC red and black containers while searching for an illo for last Saturday's Saturday Verse. I am sure you have looked at their like before. These decorated containers were surely not for everyday use.

Here are a few of them:

Amphora, c. 530 BC

Amphora with chariot and soldiers, c. 540 BC

Bell-krater (wine mixing bowl) with three women, one playing lyre. c. 460 BC. I would assume that she is singing too.

Hydria (water jug), c. 500 BC

Ain't these intertubes cool?

There are things we can touch and perceive, or perceive with technology. Some things cannot be touched but can be easily perceived, such as the charming young lassies above. Or mental life: ideas, emotions, etc. And spiritual life.

For some reason, it's Greek Week at Maggie's and, while looking for something else, I found this bit somewhere at Wiki:

Socrates is contemptuous of people who think that something has to be graspable in the hands to be real. In the Theaetetus, he says such people are "eu a-mousoi", an expression that means literally, "happily without the muses" (Theaetetus 156a). In other words, such people live without the divine inspiration that gives him, and people like him, access to higher insights about reality.

Socrates's idea that reality is unavailable to those who use their senses is what puts him at odds with the common man, and with common sense. Socrates says that he who sees with his eyes is blind, and this idea is most famously captured in his allegory of the cave, and more explicitly in his description of the divided line. The allegory of the cave (begins Republic 7.514a) is a paradoxical analogy wherein Socrates argues that the invisible world is the most intelligible ("noeton") and that the visible world ("(h)oraton") is the least knowable, and the most obscure.

It is certain that many are indifferent to the invisible world - practical, earth-bound types who are happily without the muses' gift - or burden - of reflecting on the "higher realities" and the hidden realities which seem to try to connect the human heart with the cosmic. The meta-physical or trancendent realm of thought and experience which many of us seek to grasp and hold. More:

The word metaphysics derives from the fact that Aristotle's musings about divine reality came after ("meta") his lecture notes on his treatise on nature ("physics"). The term is in fact applied to Aristotle's own teacher, and Plato's "metaphysics" is understood as Socrates' division of reality into the warring and irreconcilable domains of the material and the spiritual. The theory has been of incalculable influence in the history of Western philosophy and religion.

Indeed we are all Greeks - especially those of us who are Christians (the Greek Paul thoroughly Greekified the Christ Cult, thus translating it into a world religion). "Psyche," the soul, was a combination of the psych-ological (mental) and the spiritual/divine aspects of reality as we experience it, until academics in modern times separated psychology out as a topic of study in the Aristotelian slicing-and-dicing way. Being sober sorts, they did not want to call Psychologists "soul students," nor did Psychiatrists want to call themselves "soul physicians." So they put it in Greek, same as most of the other -ologists and -iatrists.

Photo on top of a few untouchable Muses borrowed from Egotastic.
Image below: Bust of Socrates, Louvre

Georgia born-and-raised, and CT resident Flannery O'Connor died of lupus at 39 in 1964.

A collection of her occasional pieces, Mystery and Manners, was assembled by her friend the translator and poet Robert Fitzgerald. In that collection is a gem of an essay, "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade."

Caitlin Flanagan in his WSJ piece The High Cost of Coddling (h/t, Viking) commented:

In my teaching days, no single document shaped my thinking as much as Flannery O'Connor's 1963 essay called "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade." It concerned neither guns nor violence, neither cliques nor experimental approaches to the treatment of adolescent depression. It was about . . . books. In defending the teaching of the great works of the Western canon rather than those of the modern day (which kids far preferred), she said something wise, the sort of thing an adult might say. She said that the whims and preferences of children should always, always be sublimated to the sense and judgment of their elders.
"And what if the student finds this is not to his taste?" O'Connor asked. "Well that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed."

The full O'Connor quote (via Book of Joe) is:

In other ages the attention of children was held by Homer and Virgil, among others, but, by the reverse evolutionary process, that is no longer possible; our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. No one asks the student if algebra pleases him or if he finds it satisfactory that some French verbs are irregular, but if he prefers Hersey to Hawthorne, his taste must prevail.

No child needs to be assigned Hersey or Steinbeck until he is familiar with a certain amount of the best work of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, the early James, and Crane [we can quibble with the names; I certainly quibble with Cooper’s inclusion], and he does not need to be assigned these until he has been introduced to some of the better English novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The fact that these works do not present him with the realities of his own time is all to the good. He is surrounded by the realities of his own time, and he has no perspective whatever from which to view them. Like the college student who wrote in her paper on Lincoln that he went to the movies and got shot, many students go to college unaware that the world was not made yesterday; their studies began with the present and dipped backward occasionally when it seemed necessary or unavoidable.

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.

And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

Thanks to Gerard for posting this 1999 YouTube (audio only) of Susan with Cry Me a River.

More from Gerard on Susan. Yes, she is an icon for something.

A serious marathoner friend recently told me that she had leased one of these to train for the Boston Marathon (on Monday). She does 2/3 of her running on the road, and 1/3 on the G.

60 miles/week, plus pool running and swimming a mile every other day. Yes, she is slim and ripped, but prone to shin splints over 40-50 miles/week on the road. She tends to come in right behind "the elites," as runners term them.

She complains that her job interferes with her training. Luckily, her husband and 3 kids are jocks and thus good supporters.

The G was designed as a rehab machine. It's about effort without injury. Review of the anti-gravity treadmill here. 

Pool running is cheaper. These things cost $75,000.

The Grateful Dead always performed on Persian carpets. Rug Rag takes a look at what The Dead, as they are now known, walk around on.

And speaking of rugs, here's a 5X6 Bakhtiari "flower bed" design I like. I now must brace myself for the rug expert readers to inform me of everything that is wrong with it...Our rug expert readers must understand that our rugs get rough treatment. They are subject to ice-melting salt, dogs, driveway gravel, work boots, mud, and the occasional spilled glass of red wine. Truly special antique rugs would a shame to use and abuse as we do. New-made rugs? Wouldn't touch 'em. Vulgar, garish-looking junk, most of it, with all the character of a Woolworth's velvet kitten picture.