New blog: Past - Present - Principles

Most of my writing is presently on my new blog, "Past - Present - Principles, History and Philosophy for Today's News." This a trial run for a website I'd like to produce that would offer short essays on major events in American history, with suggested readings from Ayn Rand and Objectivist scholars. If you're interested in using such as site or advertising on it, email comments@forgottendelights.com .

The NYC Tea Party, April 15, 2009

For the past 20-odd years, whenever I’ve seen a protest rally in NYC I’ve given it a wide berth. Such rallies usually offer the sort of speeches that require shouting after every sentence and are interspersed with long periods of angry chanting, all amidst pushing and shoving and general misbehavior. The average age of the participants is 20, and the cause being supported is usually a couple light-years to the far side of the extreme left. Why would I go to a protest? I’ve always known that changing someone’s mind depends on reasoned argument, not decibels.

But I decided this week that there’s one exception to that. When attempting to get a politician’s attention, decibels matter more than reasoned arguments, particularly when the decibels are emitted by a large collection of voters. I went to the tea party mostly to provide another visible, vocal voter … and was pleasantly surprised.

First of all, everyone I saw in the crowd was well dressed (as if they’d just come from a paying job), patient, and polite to the surrounding NYPD officers. The average age was probably 40. The crowd eventually stretched for 3 or 4 blocks along Broadway, and from the fence of City Hall Park across a wide sidewalk, a lane or two of the street (barricaded from traffic), and another wide sidewalk. The people toward the back could not possibly see the people on stage, yet they did not push and shove. They read and commented on the protest signs held up by members of the crowd. They listened to the speakers and clapped at appropriate times. The only thing they didn’t do well was shout in unison: whenever the organizers tried to get a chant going, it fizzled. This rather amused me—we were obviously a thinking crowd unwilling to play “follow the demagogue.”

As for the content of the speeches: I doubt that anyone who didn’t already believe government spending was out of control was converted; such conversion happens in the privacy of one’s thoughts, not in the presence of amplifiers on city streets. That said, the speeches were much better than I had expected, with repeated praise for capitalism and calls for a government responsible to the people. One speaker referred obliquely to Atlas Shrugged. I saw several signs that explicitly referred to Atlas, and met a woman who was handing out ARC’s flyer. The attendees seemed to be hard-working and thoughtful people—precisely the sort who might be persuaded by Ayn Rand’s arguments, if they are intrigued enough to read her works.

As we were leaving, the event’s organizer reminded us not to leave trash on the ground, making a joke that this was probably the only time in the history of NYC protest rallies that such a request had been made. I didn’t see so much as a dropped tissue as we left.

The rudest the crowd ever got was in expressing its disapproval of New York’s senior U.S. senator. While it would be more accurate to shout, “If the Senator disapproves of the American Constitution and defending Americans abroad, I do not wish to have him representing me,” I have to admit (purely as a student of rhetoric) that shouting “Schumer sucks” has more punch. I hope the TV crews covered that bit and gave the senator cause for insomnia.

DWJ Books

If you're looking for information on DWJ Books before signing a contract with them, email me at forgottendeli@earthlink.net. I signed a contract with them in May 2008 and have had many problems, which for legal reasons I won't post in a public forum. If you've been burned by them, I sympathize, but (also for legal reasons) I won't post your comments about them on this blog, either.

Construction at the World Trade Center

I don’t particularly like the winning design for the new buildings on the World Trade Center site, and I detest the winning design for the memorial. Still, I found myself delighted the other day to see the skeleton of a skyscraper rising out of the pit. The building is being raised on a relatively small part of the WTC site (which occupies roughly 12 full city blocks), but the site has been a horrendous hole in the ground for so long that I was beginning to wonder when anything would be built there.

Here’s a photo that shows more of the site, looking due east. The 4-story steel skeleton in the first photo is at the far left. Official photos by the WTC contractors are posted at

http://www.panynj.gov/wtcprogress/roadmap_forward.html

 As I was walking past the WTC site, my MP3 player kicked up a song by Nek that perfectly expresses the exasperation I’ve felt with American foreign policy since 9/11 - and quite a while before that. The singer is addressing someone who keeps making the same mistake and then making the same excuses for it.

Volverás a vivir
cuando quieras salir
planta cara a la realidad
No digas que te faltan fuerzas
Tú sabes bien que esta es tu guerra
No te busques un pretexto, yo apuesto
a que ganarás

Unpoetically translated: “You will start living again when you’re ready to look reality in the face. Don’t say you lack the strength – you know this is your war. Don’t look for an excuse. I’m betting on you to win.” (The song is “Volveras a vivir,” from the album La Vida Es.)

The Winter Garden at the World Financial Center is a huge indoor space with a barrel-vaulted roof in glass and steel. At the east end, a grand staircase of polished pink and white marble once led across a pedestrian bridge to the World Trade Center. Now the staircase ends at a wall of windows that is the place to go for an overview of the construction on the site. I took the photos in this post from there. As I turned to go back down the staircase, I saw the palm trees that thrive inside the Winter Garden silhouetted against the sunset and the skyscrapers of New Jersey. And suddenly I was much less tired and much less exasperated. Reminders of human ingenuity and progress always cheer me up. (I love taking photos of the best of New York City. This one will probably make it to the next Upward Glance CD.)

Welcome to New York ... now go move your car (2009 calendar)

New Yorkers who own cars and don't have off-street parking (which can cost as much per month as a small apartment in Cincinnati) spend exorbitant amounts of time trying to remember whether their car is parked on the side of the street that'll get them a $65 ticket if the street-sweepers come through. Street sweeping is suspended for 30 or more days a year, but few of us can remember which days it's safe to ignore the posted alternate-side signs.

I was inspired to design an alternate-side parking calendar by an atonal piano piece sandwiched into an otherwise enjoyable concert. I didn’t want to walk out (the pianist was amazing), but I didn't want to listen to the "music," either. So I assigned myself the task of devising a way to incorporate some of the photos I've taken of New York into a marketing piece for my husband's dental practice. By the time the piano abuse was over, I'd had the idea of doing an alternate-side parking calendar for 2009 with photos of our neighborhood around the edges. It had to fit on a single 8.5 x 11" page, include all my husband's office info, and give a URL where people could print more copies. It had to be attractive enough that people would cheerfully post it inside their front door or on their refrigerator.

The next day I laid out the calendar using the conventional format: 7 columns and 4-5 rows per month for 12 months. Alas, there wasn't enough space for pictures. Then I decided to apply some of the principles I'd learned in Edward Tufte's Visual Displays of Quantitative Information. I raised my hands and backed away from the computer (sometimes one must), and considered what information had to be included and how to organize it with the least possible visual interference. After much tweaking of font sizes, table margins, and text colors, I managed to fit all the necessary information plus quite a few photos. A scanned image is below; to see the calendar as a PDF, click here.  (The blog text continues below the scanned image.)

Tufte's Visual Displays of Quantitative Information focuses on organizing visual information so that it's comprehensible at a glance. Reading it will change the way you look at printed material and websites as well as the way you organize material on a page - even if you're only printing a flyer for a garage sale.

Print as many copies as you like of the calendar for your front door, your refrigerator, your glove compartment, and your friends. If you're curious about the images, the locations are given at  http://www.doctordurante.com/2009.htm.

Sylvia Bokor's Blog

My long-time friend Sylvia Bokor, an artist and writer, has just started a blog. Check it out at

http://www.sylviabokorcomments.blogspot.com/

The latest post (as I write this) is on mystery writer John Dunning, and it nails down an aspect of his style that had bothered me enough so that I only read one of his books - but which I hadn't bothered to put into words.

History as Prozac

I am usually “even tempered and good-natured, whom you never hear complain,” but like Henry Higgins, occasionally I get furiously angry. My trigger at the moment is the upcoming presidential election. As an Objectivist, I don’t think the government should dictate how I run my private life or my business; it ought to confine itself to protecting individual rights, including protecting me from attacks foreign or domestic. (See Ayn Rand’s “The Nature of Government.”) McCain and Obama are both promising more regulations and more government programs that would affect every aspect of my life, and neither one has convinced me that he’ll fight genuine threats such as Iran. So when I see either one talking on TV, I soon find myself shouting at them, and wondering how a nation with such brilliant founding principles can survive, if we're reduced to choices such as this. Pass the Prozac, please.

 My Prozac is history, because history gives me a sense of perspective on passing events. Last summer I started working part-time as a cataloguer for Martayan Lan, a bookseller specializing in works printed before 1800, particularly the history of science, travel and discovery, and art and architecture. I typically skim a book and then write a page-long description of it, setting the book in context as a major contribution to knowledge, a quaint leftover from an earlier age, or something between. Recently I’ve described a 17th-century book on heart defects, a collection of reports submitted by Jesuits around the world in the 1590s, French newspapers promoting the California Gold Rush, and a compilation of women’s legal rights in 16th-c. Portugal.

Not long ago I described a book of medical aphorisms: Latin couplets that purported to help students and physicians remember how to diagnose and/or treat various ailments. The information in the poems was probably centuries old when the book came out, and had mostly likely been distorted by years of unthinking repetition to the point of being useless, if not outright harmful.

Here's the kicker: the book was published in 1589. Forty years earlier (the whole working life of a physician at that time), Andreas Vesalius had dissected cadavers and had published the results of his research in a beautiful multi-volume work. (See the illustrations at http://tinyurl.com/6nxkr9 ). Others were also finally looking at nature rather than parroting ancient and medieval authors: physicians of this era described the circulation of the blood in the lungs and set the foundation for the systematic study of tropical diseases. Those at the cutting edge in science knew better than to simply memorize and apply medieval solutions in Latin doggerel. Many of them must have howled with rage that any publisher would print works such as Scholtz' Aphorismorum medicinalium.

And yet … eventually books like that were no longer published. Those who were constantly expanding their knowledge and confidently announcing their discoveries did eventually triumph. Reality and reason won out, in the long run - although not without staunch defenders who fought long, difficult battles.

So when I need a pick-me-up from the current depressing presidential election, history is my Prozac. If you need some anti-depressants, try these:

• Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World
  
• Bronowski, Jacob. The Western Intellectual Tradition: From Leonardo to Hegel.  
  
• Frederick B. Artz, The Mind of the Middle Ages
  
• Paul Johnson, Modern Times
  
• Paul Johnson, Birth of the Modern
  
• Printing and the Mind of Man
  
• Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler
  
• Herold, The Age of Napoleon
  
• Gordon, John Steele.  A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable.
  
• Loon, Willem van. The Story of Mankind. 
  
• Manchester, William. A World Lit Only by Fire. 
  
• Bryson, Bill. Short History of Nearly Everything
  
• Petrocelli, Daniel. The Triumph of Justice: Closing the Book on the Simpson Saga   
  
• McCullough, David. John Adams
  
• Ellis, Joseph. His Excellency (on George Washington)
  
• Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (on Manhattan)