Another nice piece by Toole biographer Cory MacLauchlin.
Finding Walker Percy
Another nice piece by Toole biographer Cory MacLauchlin.
Northern California Gastronomic Summary
On a recent trip to Northern California here are the highlights (with a couple of lowlights), listed alphabetically.
Pricey but you will get a more than decent meal.
Empanadas that were disappointing. More like an overly dry Cornish pasty.
Best chocolate I’ve come across and that includes France and Belgium. Brownie flight, tiramisu, hot chocolate, frozen chocolate drink. Fantastic trio of Madagascarian, Liberian and Venezuelan cocoa bars. Touch, view, taste all aspects of production.
All super wines in a tasting room that is fun and that has had a lot of money thrown at it. While staff were very pleasant they were hired hands. A strong Burgundy connection.
Excellent wines in an intimate tasting room where you can speak to one of the most enthusiastic, knowledgeable and honest winemakers you’ll ever come across — fascinating listening to Joe.
Charming hippy-hangover joint.
The surprise of the trip. Jawaiian jerk chicken plate (excellent), seaweed salad (excellent); and of the cocktails Dr. Funk (winner), Painkiller (tie), Tropical Itch (tie), Hurricane (loser). Normally a kitschy set-up like this delivers mediocrity but this place is different. A fun place. Pleasant service.
Aguadito de Mariscos to die for. Highly knowledgeable support of small local wineries. Our host was the charming Bryan who long after the restaurant had closed its doors for the night, plied us with wine and of course the conversation flowed as well.
Eggs & excellent British mini-bangers, quesadilla (good). Pleasant service.
Good servings and tasty burritos and chile rellenos.
Skirt steak good, quesadilla (crap). Service a bit confused though not on account of our very pleasant server.
Excellent and cheap spicy pork Korean taco. Pleasant service.
San Francisco institution. Marinated veg, calamari, pizza (fresh spinach & shaved parmesan; shrimp & veg) and excellent wine recommended by owner Agostino who was extremely accommodating in giving us the reserved family table (thanks to our knowledgeable and generous host).
Elegant bar (despite screens) well-placed to people watch in the Castro district.
Unpretentious, intimate and elegant tasting room with low-key winemaker Van in attendance. Van’s rose restored my interest in rosé a style of wine that has been deprecated by schlocky marketing and bad neighborhood restaurant wine stocks. While in tasting room olive oil maker Steve popped in with his terrifically peppery olive oil.
Excellent dim sum. Very pricy.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother of Rock ’n’ Roll
Born on the 20th, her centenary. Good article in The Guardian.
Master Sniffer and the Science of Smell
Check out this article by Wayne Curtis and this article by philosopher Louise Richardson.
The Spontaneous Order and the Family
The intro to Lauren Hall’s chapter.
Smith scholarship is conflicted on whether the apparent conflict between self-interest in the Wealth of Nations (WN) and sympathy in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) indicates an intractable problem or is merely the result of a misunderstanding of Smith’s overall system. This chapter is written as a response both to the believers in Das Adam Smith Problem and to those who offer a way of pulling the two texts together. In the first place, I argue that Das Adam Smith Problem highlights the complexity of Smith’s body of work and his belief that the motives for behavior in the private sphere will be different from and sometimes conflict with the rules of the public sphere. Secondly, I argue that the higher level economic order relies fundamentally on norms of behavior and rules of conduct that are nourished by the sympathy fostered in the lower level orders of family and friends. At the same time, the economic order affects these lower orders, influencing in turn the norms of behavior and rules of conduct that support economic activity. Understanding how these different levels of order interact is central to understanding the often murky link between economics and morality. Such an understanding also begs for a reevaluation of the social sciences from the silos of separate political and economic analysis back to a Smithian “moral philosophy” that takes into account human social behavior in its many forms.
Walker Percy Wednesday – 26
I shrug. There is only one thing I can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along, and for good and selfish reasons. It only remains to decide whether this vocation is best pursued in a service station or—
“Are you going to medical school?”
“If she wants me to.”
“Does that mean you can’t marry me now?”
“No. You have plenty of money.”
“Then let us understand each other.”
“All right.”
“I don’t know whether I can succeed.”
“I know you don’t.”
. . . . .
“I am frightened when I am alone and I am frightened when I am with people. The only time I’m not frightened is when I’m with you. You’ll have to be with me a great deal.”
. . . . .
Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus?
It is impossible to say.
. . . . .
As for my search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject. For one thing, I have not the authority, as the great Danish philosopher declared, to speak of such matters in any way other than the edifying. For another thing, it is not open to me even to be edifying, since the time is later than his, much too late to edify or do much of anything except plant a foot in the right place as the opportunity presents itself—if indeed asskicking is properly distinguished from edification.
Further: I am a member of my mother’s family after all and so naturally shy away from the subject of religion (a peculiar word this in the first place, religion; it is something to be suspicious of).
Instincts and the Invisible Order: The Possibility of Progress
The intro to Jonathan Wight’s chapter.
The invisible hand means a variety of things to modern writers, who use the phrase loosely to imply the market, the price system, efficiency, laissez-faire, greed is good, and so on (Samuels et. al., 2011; Medema, 2009; Rothschild, 1994). In some circles the invisible hand is referred to with reverence and in others with mockery. What Smith wrote, and meant, is quite different from current constructions. At first reading, Smith’s three references to an invisible hand appear to be unconnected turns of phrase. One can find ample reason for agreeing with Kennedy (2009) that the expression’s current use has been blown out of all proportion to its author’s original intent and any reasonable extrapolation thereof. On the other edge of the spectrum are authors like Klein and Lucas (2011), who argue that the invisible hand is the central concept of Smith’s work and that Smith consciously placed it at the exact physical midpoint of both his books as a rhetorical pièce de résistance, the most nourishing part of the meal. This proposition is implausible on many levels. If there were such an intended dialectical message it is curious that it remained hidden from all of Smith’s friends and closest colleagues. It is possible to argue a middle ground, however, as in this essay, that the concept behind the invisible hand is central to Smith’s work, but that the phrase itself is only one of many spread out through his work, and that the placement, as well as the exact phraseology, are non-issues. In the wider context of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, the “invisible hand” represents those unseen instincts of human nature that motivate and direct behavior. When channeled through appropriate human institutions, the invisible hand can generate a spontaneous order that in many cases produces a beneficial social outcome.
California
Walker Percy Wednesday – 25
“One last question to satisfy my idle curiosity. What has been going on in your mind during all the years when we listened to music together, read the Crito, and spoke together—or was it only I who spoke—good Lord, I can’t remember—of goodness and truth and beauty and nobility?”
Another cry and the ramoneur is gone. There is nothing for me to say.
“Don’t you love these things? Don’t you live by them?”
“No.”
“What do you love? What do you live by?”
I am silent.
“Tell me where I have failed you.”
“You haven’t.”
“What do you think is the purpose of life—to go to the movies and dally with every girl that comes along?”
. . .
Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde When I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies—my only talent—smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.
Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral. My search has been abandoned; it is no match for my aunt, her rightness and her despair, her despairing of me and her despairing of me and her despairing of herself. Whenever I take leave of my aunt after one of her serious talks, I have to find a girl.
Modern Greatness of Soul in Hume and Smith
Lovely essay by Andrew Corsa (H/T to Eric Schliesser)
