Walker Percy Wednesday 82

walker percy

percycovercroppea

Then they sat in their house at Pass Christian, put a bottle of whiskey between them, felt a surge of happiness, were able to speak frankly and cheerfully to each other, laugh and joke, drink, even make love. But that is crazy. Why should people be miserable in good weather and happy in bad? Surely not because they are sinners in good weather and saints in bad. True, people help each other in catastrophes. But they don’t feel good because they help each other. They help each other because they feel good. No, it’s because something has happened to us which is so bad that we don’t even have a word for it. Sin isn’t the word. Your Christ didn’t exactly foresee anything like this, did he? Hurricanes, which are very bad things, somehow neutralize the other bad thing which has no name, so that one can breathe easy, become free once again to sin or not to sin. The couple I spoke of became free and happy only during the passage of the eye of the hurricane, that is, capable of both love and hate (ordinarily they were numb, moved like ghosts), of honesty and lying.

*****

No, it was so much simpler than that. It was simply that there is such a thing as a beautiful day to go out into, a road to travel, good food to eat when you’re hungry, wine to drink when you’re thirsty, and most of all, 99 percent of all, no: all of all: a woman to love.

*****

There are only three ways to go. One is their way out there, the great whorehouse and fagdom of America. I won’t have it. The second way is sweet Baptist Jesus and I won’t have that. Christ, if heaven is full of Southern Baptists, I’d rather rot in hell with Saladin and Achilles. There is only one way and we could have had it if you Catholics hadn’t blown it: the old Catholic way.

*****

If I were a Jew, I’d know what to do. It’s easy. I’d be in Israel with the sabras. They’re my kind. The only difference between them and the Crusaders is that the Crusaders lost. Ha, isn’t that a switch, come to think of it—that the only Crusaders left in the entire Western world are the Israelis, the very Jews who huddled and shrank and grinned and nodded for two thousand years? The Jews are lucky. They know who they are and they have Israel. We have to make our own Israel, but we know who we are.

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The Morality of Freedom/Morals by Agreement

liberalism

It’s been thirty years since arguably the last great works of liberal political philosophy in the analytical tradition appeared, setting aside Rawls’ Political Liberalism from 1993. The Morality of Freedom is freely available  — click image.

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With all this talk of Shakespeare Cervantes is overlooked

Cervantes

His words still shape our consciousness, even if we fail to read him. This is not due to some hackneyed idealism (“tilting at windmills”), but rather to his pervasive impact on the genre that taught us to think like moderns: the novel. He pioneered the representation of individual subjectivity and aspiration, which today undergirds the construction of agency in any narrative, whether in novels, films, television, or the daily self-fashioning by millions of users of social media. Thus William Egginton recently bestowed upon him the title, “the man who invented fiction.” He discovered the fictive within each of us. — Cervantes’s pen silenced today

IND119216 Portrait of Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra (1547-1615) 1600 (oil on panel) by Jauregui y Aguilar, Juan de (c.1566-1641); Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain; Index; Spanish, out of copyright

Rick’s Picks smokra

gastronomy

Time for something gastronomical. Without doubt the best pickled Okra I’ve had. Double the price of your standard supermarket bottle, but really worth it. And from Brooklyn! Really smokey, the Islay of pickled veg.

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Distributed Selves: Personal Identity and Extended Memory Systems

extended mind

Richard Heersmink’s new EM paper.

mind-body

 

Big News for “Pops” Aficionados

Louis Armstrong

The Louis Armstrong House Museum has acquired the only known film of the great jazz musician in a recording studio, recording the 1959 album, “Satchmo Plays King Oliver.” This exclusive video depicts Armstrong and his All Stars recording the master take of “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” as well as silent footage of them listening to the playback. Also featured in the clip are Trummy Young, trombone, Peanuts Hucko, clarinet, Billy Kyle, piano, Mort Herbert, bass and Danny Barcelona, drums. The original album was produced for Audio Fidelity records by Sid Frey, who commissioned the film to be made. It was discovered in a storage facility in 2012 and was brought to the Armstrong House with help of Frey’s daughter, Andrea Bass.
Fun things to look out for:
*There’s no sheet music, forcing Louis to make up a few lyrics (“hot mamas!”)
*Watch for Louis breaking himself up after quoting “Pennies from Heaven” during the opening trumpet chorus.
*Armstrong often said when he scatted, he’d move his fingers as if he was playing the trumpet; watch the dramatic hand gestures during the vocal!
*We can’t hear the playback, but Louis looks satisfied. (That’s Dukes of Dixieland manager Joe Delaney sitting next to Louis.) And dig those shorts!
*This was all filmed at the famous Radio Recorders in Los Angeles, a great glimpse into a world-renowned studio.

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Organizational Decisions in the Lab

Herbert Simon

The eleventh in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon.

Massimo Egidi

“Bounded Rationality” is a label that gathers the most important advancements of Herbert Simon’s scientific production. His fundamental contributions to cognitive psychology and to the theory of problem solving were developed jointly, each being nurtured by the discoveries emanating from the other discipline. I will briefly review some steps on the path to the creation of the theory of bounded rationality, in order to introduce to the issue of organizational decision making, and the associated laboratory experiments.

From the very start, Simon built the idea of bounded rationality on close observation of the behavior of employees and managers in large organizations. In Administrative Behavior, published in 1947, he came to the realization that organization’s internal mechanisms, insofar as they are characterized by division of labour and cooperation, are the product of a complex activity of goal achieving. Important progresses in this direction were achieved in the fifties, through some empirical analyses of managerial decisions that he conducted at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration of Carnegie Mellon. Among them, of primary interest is the research he conducted jointly with Cyert and Trow in which they realize that beyond the routine decisions, managers make non-repetitive decisions that require solving problems in ill-defined conditions. (Cyert, Simon and Trow, 1956, p. 238)

The field analysis of problem solving sowed the seeds of theory of bounded rationality. In Organizations (1958) March and Simon moved forward from the notion of problem solving as individual activity to the notion of organizational problem solving, with a clear recognition of the evolutionary processes of organizational adaptation and organizational learning within business corporations. The identification of these processes was enhanced by the assumption that the division of labour can be considered a collective problem solving activity. Thus, the development of a deeper theory of problem solving became crucial in explaining human decisions and for the creation of new ideas in theory of organization: in particular the notion of organizational routines within business firms, and of their evolution.

At the time he was finishing his work on Organizations, Simon began his collaboration with Allen Newell. Human Problem Solving, which they published together in 1972, is a bridge between computation, artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. Here Simon went beyond the notion of “computation” as a human activity that relates means to ends, replacing it with the notion of symbolic manipulation and deepening the various connected mental abilities — memorization, evocation, categorization, abstraction, judgment.

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Dirty Mind

music, Prince

Neither For You nor Prince was adequate preparation for the full-blown masterpiece of Prince’s third album, Dirty Mind. Recorded in his home studio, with Prince playing nearly every instrument, Dirty Mind is a stunning, audacious amalgam of funk, new wave, R&B, and pop, fueled by grinningly salacious sex and the desire to shock. Where other pop musicians suggested sex in lewd double-entendres, Prince left nothing to hide — before its release, no other rock or funk record was ever quite as explicit as Dirty Mind [ed. What about the Mothers @ Filmore East?], with its gleeful tales of oral sex, threesomes, and even incest. Certainly, it opened the doors for countless sexually explicit albums, but to reduce its impact to mere profanity is too reductive — the music of Dirty Mind is as shocking as its graphic language, bending styles and breaking rules with little regard for fixed genres. Basing the album on a harder, rock-oriented beat more than before, Prince tries everything — there’s pure new wave pop (“When You Were Mine”), soulful crooning (“Gotta Broken Heart Again”), robotic funk (“Dirty Mind”), rock & roll (“Sister”), sultry funk (“Head,” “Do It All Night”), and relentless dance jams (“Uptown,” “Partyup”), all in the space of half an hour. It’s a breathtaking, visionary album, and its fusion of synthesizers, rock rhythms, and funk set the style for much of the urban soul and funk of the early ’80s. — AllMusic

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Walker Percy Wednesday 81

walker percy

percycovercroppea

During the last months I found that I could be moderately happy if I simultaneously (1) drank, (2) read Raymond Chandler, and (3) listened to Beethoven.

*****

The world had gone crazy, said the crazy man in his cell. What was nutty was that the movie folk were trafficking in illusions in a real world but the real world thought that its reality could only be found in the illusions. Two sets of maniacs.

*****

Which is a better world, this cocksucking cuntlapping assholelicking fornicating Happyland U.S.A. or a Roman legion under Marcus Aurelius Antoninus? Which is worse, to die with T. J. Jackson at Chancellorsville or live with Johnny Carson in Burbank?

Yes, I’ll be out of here in a month or two. What do we intend to do, you ask? We? I can only speak for me. Others will then do likewise. But let me give you an example from my future life. Yes! I may be uncertain about the past, about what happened—it’s all confused, I’d rather not think about it—but I know what the future and the new order and my life will be like. The new order will not be based on Catholicism or Communism or fascism or liberalism or capitalism or any ism at all, but simply on that stem rectitude valued by the new breed and marked by the violence which will attend its breach. We will not tolerate this age. Don’t speak to me of Christian love. Whatever came of it? I’ll tell you what came of it. It got mouthed off on the radio and TV from the pulpit and that was the was the end of it. The Jews knew better. Billy Graham lay down with Nixon and got up with a different set of fleas, but the Jewish prophets lived in deserts and wildernesses and had no part with corrupt kings. I’ll prophesy: This country is going to turn into a desert and it won’t be a bad thing. Thirst and hunger are better than jungle rot. We will begin in the Wilderness where Lee lost. Deserts are clean places. Corpses turn quickly into simply pure chemicals.

*****

Children will be merry because they will know what they are to do.

*****

New Orleans is a shabby gentle benign place. We shall buy a small Victorian cottage under the levee and live a simple life.

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Want to See Women’s Equality? Look to Jazz

jazz

Mark Judge article in Acculturated (Mark can be excused for using the tarnished term “liberal” which unfortunately gives genuine free speech liberals a bad name).

Many of the best jazz musicians are women, and many of them are creating brilliant music. Furthermore, they create without having to resort to shedding clothing or causing public scandal to get attention.

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