Maggie's Farm

1. Loyal Reader: Thanks for the tip on the Big Damn Book of Sheer Manliness. Somebody should have given me that one when I was 15, but I see it didn't come out until '98. I done gess I jes gotta get me one for my own dam sef.

2. Another extraordinary "manspace" I have seen is an aquaintance who put a two-story cathedral-ceilinged addition on his house for his gun collection. No windows (for security), and a steel door to the rest of the house. Huge fieldstone fireplace with a Cape Buffalo headmount over the mantle, leather couches, antique oriental rugs, and balcony all around the second level with built-in mahogany gun racks for his collection of one example of every Winchester ever made. Plus enough other guns to fully stock a high-end gun shop. Room loaded with game heads - Africa and N. America - and mounted birds. A heavy glass door to the stairway to the stone-lined underground wine cellar. Wow.

3.  Re the whole question of moderate Moslems  towelheads, click continuation page for the really good kind of towelhead (almost, but not quite, work-safe):

Do most men need a place to go to be alone, or to be with the guys, where they can feel undomesticated among their own stuff? I think so.

The barn, the garage, the workshop, the tack room, the gun room, and, in big houses, maybe the library or the study. A "family room" does not fit the bill - it defeats the purpose.

Villainous Company takes a look at a new book, Manspace. 

Also, Dust my Broom shows you his.

Gwynnie and I have a friend who has the best "manspace" I have ever seen. It's his boathouse, with a deck over the water. Inside, cabinets for his boating and fishing stuff, racks for fishing poles, racks suspended from the ceiling for masts, a pool table, a refrigerator filled with beer, a well-stocked humidor, a cooktop, a bar, TV, music and good speakers, etc etc. Decorated with hunting and fishing art. There's a big old wood stove, but he had the place heated and insulated.

You know about PEBD, right? (h/t, Jules C):

Recovering PEBD victims vividly confirm Leveran's description of the disease. "I found myself completely paralyzed by joy," said Malcolm Renner, whose website recently sold for 1.2 billion dollars. "I could tell--foggily--that my Maserati teetered on the edge of a mountain road in Tuscany," he recalled, "but if the supermodels in my back seat had been an ounce lighter, I wouldn't be here today."

Whole heart-breaking article here. I think we need a Federal program to help these people. Teams of counselors and social workers, ready to go at a moment's notice. Maybe involve FEMA, too.

Definitely unusual - but life is strange. Here. Piece at Ace.

Ace, predictably, wondered about their future sex life, but we wondered about motor control. Whose brain does the walking? It seems to me that the one on the right just kinda goes along for the ride. Anyway, the whole thing is fascinating, and they are remarkable in their "normalcy."

A new bio of the remarkable, irrepressible William James is out. Quote from review in the Boston Globe:

In "William James," Robert Richardson, whose previous subjects were Thoreau and Emerson, seeks to understand James's "life through his work, not the other way around." Richardson presents no new interpretations of James's theories of pragmatism and pluralism. Nor does he attempt to critique them. But he has a knack for explaining complex ideas clearly and elegantly and for bringing to life a fascinating character. Various William Jameses, Richardson suggests, lived inside the man: As he willed himself into optimism, he was often sad, irritable, and depressed. But the "central" or "essential" James was an apostle of activity, spontaneity, doubt, chance, and chaos, "astonishingly, even alarmingly open to new experiences," including a headlong plunge into the maelstrom of American modernism.

The whole thing is here.  Image: Henry and brother William (on right) James. Two brothers could hardly be more different in temperament. Henry was "an old lady," and William a wild and crazy, drug-abusing, skirt-chasing dude.

With pin-up calendars for hospitalized vets. (h/t, Iowahawk)

This healthy-lookin gal Gina has really nice hats.

And what could be more health-promoting than cute girls?

You can buy one for yourself too, if you want one - but it's not tax-deductible. If you go there, tell 'em Dave from Iowahawk sent ya. Dave deserves the credit.

Shamefully, furtively, guiltily stolen in full from YARGB:

The New York Review of Books: A Mission to Convert: "The reason Dawkins thinks he has something to say about God is, of course, clear: he is an evolutionary biologist. And as we all know, Darwinism had an early and noisy run-in with religion. What Dawkins never seems to consider is that this incident might have been, in an important way, local and contingent. It might, in other words, have turned out differently, at least in principle. Believers could, for instance, have uttered a collective 'So what?' to evolution. Indeed some did. The angry reaction of many religious leaders to Darwinism had complex causes, involving equal parts ignorance, fear, politics, and the sheer shock of the new. The point is that it's far from certain that there is an ineluctable conflict between the acceptance of evolutionary mechanism and the belief that, as William James put it, 'the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe.' Instead, we and Dawkins might simply be living through the reverberations of an interesting, but not especially fundamental, bit of Victorian history. If so, evolutionary biology would enjoy no particularly exalted pulpit from which to preach about religion.

There is no conflict, and the whole Dawkins thing is silly. From what I've heard, scientists are just as religious, or non-religious, as the rest of the population. Science and religion exist in entirely different spheres of experience.

Thinking about Tuscany today. This is the Franciscan cloister of Santa Croce, in Firenze, taken last year. Who is entombed in the basilica? Among others, Michelangelo, Galileo, Enrico Fermi, and Machiavelli. A true Hall of Fame.

A villainously good post from Villainous Company. One quote:

Submission. What a stale, moldy, outdated, concept. I cringe, even while I'm typing it because I'm sure it will bring the wrath of God down on my poor head for daring even to suggest that I agree wholeheartedly, unreservedly, with the author on this score. Marriage is a parnership meant to last a lifetime, and it's not easy making a marriage work. It's a serious promise, not just a few silly words you toss off unadvisedly, thinking in the back of your mind, "Well gosh, now I kinda sorta love her, but if the feeling passes I can always get a divorce."

I believe you are promising, not to feel love, but to practice it, and that is an entirely different matter when you are looking at a four or five decade time horizon. On the day you marry, if both a man and wife aren't willing to put their marriage ahead of their careers, their children, and most importantly their own private selfish interests: if they aren't willing to submerge at least a part of themselves into this larger thing called "the marriage", it won't survive.

Does that mean you lose yourself? Of course not.

Read the entire, thoughtful piece.

Dalrymple, a retired psychiatrist, takes on the subject of evil through the lens of Rwanda. A quote:

The murderers were pleased with their work, they thought of all the corrugated iron roofing, cattle and so forth that they were ‘earning’ by it. They had never been so prosperous as during this period of slaughter and looting. Unaccustomed to eating meat very often (the Tutsi were pastoralists, the Hutu cultivators), they gorged themselves upon it, like hyenas finding an abandoned kill in the bush. Very few were their pauses for thought.

 

Let us not console ourselves with the thought that these were unsophisticated Africans, without the mental capacity to know better: in short, mere savages. Again, I do not know how much Hatzfeld has edited their words, but his perpetrator interlocutors seem to me more articulate than most of the people with whom I have had to deal in Britain as patients over the last decade and a half. Indeed, their language occasionally becomes poetic: though poetic language in this circumstance is mere euphemism.

Ricky Nelson. Hello MaryLou

The Band. The Weight

Grateful Dead. Truckin'

Van Morrison and Dylan: Crazy Love

BB King: The Thrill is Gone

Dylan. Like a Rolling Stone (from the MTV Unplugged)

Billy Holiday: Strange Fruit

Louis Armstrong. I cover the waterfront

Stevie Ray Vaughn and Albert King messing around

What is art about? The New Criterion's December art issue is out, and just the introduction is a fine and succinct update on the current state of art criticism. One quote:

At least since the 1970s, efforts to dethrone the aesthetic and short-circuit or marginalize greatness have triumphed in the academy and many other institutions charged with the preservation and transmission of our artistic patrimony. Several of the pieces in this issue discern a possible change in the ideological weather, a shift away from regarding ideology as the proper end of the critical project. It is too early to call these preliminary sightings a forecast or gather them together to make a prediction. But here and there we sense an accumulation of positive signs, a yearning for something lost—a recognition, at least, that something has been lost.

We ain't seen any yet this year, and it's a shame. I am sure that Mad River Glen is not pleased either. Photo from December, 2005.