Month: August 2021

Like probably everybody, I like to binge. Thankfully, my days of binge drinking are long over. But what counts as a binge? Is it nothing more than excessive indulgence? If so, “excessive” implies a negative, such as with the drinking. However, people also binge on television series. Granted, obsessively watching Downton Abbey episodes to the point that you can’t properly perform activities of daily living such as cooking, cleaning, and work, is a definite negative. But people love to binge-brag, and media companies love to invite you program-binge (I myself am somewhat tempted by the upcoming “Miss Marple” – off). They literally use the word. Alcohol vendors don’t run public ads inviting you to Bacardi-binge. We will just have to accept that “binge” has an additional, positive, connotation. There must be a philological concept of word meanings going from negative to positive via some cultural usage shift. “What were once vices are now habits”. Here’s a brief riff on some of my favorite binges. I expect to indulge in more binge-related posts, thus the titular Roman numeral.

Maps. I cannot remember a time that I didn’t love looking at maps. In fact, when the Pluto data started coming back, I wrote a one-line iambic nonameter poem: “Like Bilbo Baggins, I love maps; therefore I love this recent map of Pluto”. IIRC I used it in a seminar I gave at the time, not coincidentally about geospatial programming in R. One of my grandfathers was a hobbyist – not only did he polish semi-precious gemstones and cut large agates into thin sheets, he cast plastic sundries, including (back in the day when cigarette smoking was everywhere) an ashtray that was the outline of Oregon, which for some reason fascinated 5-year-old me. I get lost zooming around web maps, switching between satellite, map, and street views. Possibly half of my love for Dungeons and Dragons in high school was the drawing of campaign and dungeon maps, often at the expense of taking class notes.

Food programs. I have watched most the food programming I can find on our streaming services, that has an educational component. Not necessarily “how to do something” programs, although definitely those, but also ones where they spend a lot of time on chef techniques, chef descriptions of their approach, and/or exquisite filming of cooking some dish. I can sometimes get something out of the competition shows, although they’re kind of a secondary source. Shows that follow people who are famous for being well known (I usually don’t recognize them) watching them eat? Mrs. Dean got me to watch one episode of “Someone Feed Phil”. Not for me.

Drink. As mentioned, I don’t binge drink anymore, although I have very fond memories from when I did do that (this suggests that I wasn’t very “good” at it, as the conventional wisdom is that I shouldn’t remember!). My obsession is not with excessive drink consumption, rather with excessive drink quality. Craft beers and gourmet sodas are what I’m talking about here. Not wine. I also quite enjoy single-malt whisky, although only in small amounts, not even getting tipsy. Interestingly, I will fall in love with a beer, preferentially drink mostly that for a few years, and then switch to another. Not because I don’t like the first one any more, as I seldom quite totally abandon old favorites, but probably because a combination of menu fatigue and something new (to me) comes along. Gourmet sodas, to me, start with a cane sugar requirement. In my youth I mostly drank root beer, Hires bubbling up as a favorite in my lapsed memory. Today I favor Maine Root sarsaparilla, root beer, and birch beer. Virgil’s root beer is quite good, and Boylan’s black cherry may be the best soda I have ever tried, strangely for me as it is not actually a root beer.

the temple bell stops / but the music keeps coming / out of the flowers —Basho

While I do love a good poem, I don’t like all poems. The same with other art. A piece must transport me to a “different world”, of memory or of possibility. Technique is critical: any flaws distract from the transport and can foreclose on the desiderata. Technique is particularly important with ensemble dance, where unity of motion can transport me, but any skew gesture, by accident or by design, leaves me dejected. For poems, even the typesetting is important. Granted, “A poem should be palpable and mute, as a globed fruit” (MacLiesh), but also: A poem should be ample, able, and put, as a figured blot. I do expose myself to new art (though not like Bud Clark), but am rarely rewarded. I am highly aware of difficulties in communicating simple factual information to people who sincerely want to receive it and are competent to comprehend it. Transmitting complex emotional information to a diverse and random audience must be leagues more difficult.

Last year Mrs. Dean and I visited Bonn to tour Beethoven’s house and take in some museums. I elected to experience modern art. Gallery after gallery, my disappointment increased, until finally I espied, across one gallery and through a doorway to the next, something quite intriguing. I savored the anticipation as I tried to “get” the pieces in my current gallery, and finally allowed myself to enter the tempting one. Alas! It was the historical room, with fine pieces by Max Ernst and others – nobody from any recent decade. I was of course happy to enjoy the genius, but rueful, reflecting on my lack of personal response to the rest of the museum. A few years prior, Mrs. Dean and I had visited the Tate in London, mainly to visit the Turner collection, but there was plenty from the early 1900’s. Those “classic” modernists (can I use such a juxtaposition?) were expressing something detectable and special absent from more recent works.

I’ve never really followed musical trends, but I was caught up in the Grunge phenomenon. I happened to live in Seattle then, but that hardly matters as I rarely attended live music, and then mostly just local bar bands, not really enjoying it. I listened to the radio and bought the CDs. I wonder if “spirit of the age” is a real phenomenon. The eras of the Dutch Masters, the Impressionists, Dada; the Big Band era, Rock-and-Roll, Grunge. It seems as if there are brief intervals of innovation punctuated by longer ones deserted by the muses. Does culture need to chew, swallow, digest, and sleep before fully absorbing the innovations it has hunted, gathered, or cultivated? The imitators that come after can be just as competent, or even technically better, than the founders, but their work is obviously derivative. The innovators whose efforts stall out are obviously groping for something original, but either have no vision or can’t express it in a way that attracts colleagues and patrons. I think it may take a rare confluence of cultural readiness, practitioner availability, and patron generosity to create conditions where a seed crystal can nucleate an artistic revolution. I hope that long intervals of novelty vacuum somehow allow culture to become supersaturated with “blah”, making it ever more likely that authentic genius will trigger widespread innovation. I’m definitely ready for another one.

I love double-names for cities. Sedro-Woolley. Winston-Salem. Nagorno-Karabakh. The German city I lived in for a couple of years was single-named, but could well be the offspring of that Oregon town housing a scientific research center in the middle of the grass seed capital of the world, and the notably pedestrian- (and cyclist- ?) friendly village from which Bagginses set off on their adventures. Was I Bilbo with a bicycle? Pippin with a penny-farthing? Actually, if I am any Tolkien character, it would probably be Radagast, so I should probably have bought a recumbent, to adhere to my alliteration. While living there I embarked on several non-motorific adventures radiating outwards from my town along trails and farm roads to all sorts of places: castles, werewolf sculptures, nature parks, viewpoints.

One of my favorite bike trips was the ~60 km round-trip journey to a nearby Dutch town, across the Wurm. For some reason I just got a kick biking across the tiny bridge and being in a different country. If only the Euro was as pretty as the Guilder used to be. Absent lockdown I would do that trip every few weeks. It was quite a workout. There are many possible routes, although the fastest requires some village/city riding. It is mostly paved or gravel, forest paths and farm roads. I could reliably do about two thirds of the route without my navvy, but I would invariably get a bit lost then turn it on and have it start telling me what to do. Sometimes I would deliberately get really lost, striking out almost at random until I felt the need to visit Ralph’s Taverna, which offers an excellent chili con carne and Texels Skuumkoppe. Usually, getting back on track from getting “lost” took me through even more delightful dirt trails than my usual routes.

Another great trip is a loop around one of the local brown coal mines. Germany shut down its own nuclear power plants and now has to import some of its electricity from countries that didn’t shut down theirs. It also has to burn an awful lot of coal, the shitty kind, “brown” coal or lignite. It is not the coal mine, however, that makes the trip great (although you can get your fill of some spectactular open-pit mining views). One great thing is that a lot of the route is on trails through the woods, sometimes alongside rivers and streams, or through dirt roads between farm fields. Much more rural than the trip across the Wurm. What urbanity there is is very low-key, farm villages rather than bedroom communities. Fields of carrots, oats, maize, wheat, beets, rape (“canola”), and more are everywhere. Another great thing is the Indeman. The local small river, the Inde, defines the name of the region: Indeland. The Indeman is a tall (something like eight stories) metal sculpture in the cubist form of a standing, gesturing person. It is a steel frame construct that you can climb (or ride the elevator) to the top of for an encompassing view of the local landscape, including the coal mine, the small villages and larger city, farms, wind generators, rivers and woods.