According to my favorite online dictionary, a koan is "a paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence on reason and to force them into gaining sudden intuitive enlightenment." And the most famous koan is, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" The idea is that there is not a rational answer—the monk must come to an intuitive answer to the question.

As the best monks will tell you, this is pure bullshit. (There's a lot of that in India.) I thought about the sound of one hand clapping for a couple of decades and I came to an answer that is both rational and spiritual. The most common answer to the question is that it is (with apologies to Paul Simon) the sound of silence. The idea has something to do with hearing the sound of no sound. Again, as the best monks will tell you, this is pure bullshit.

According to the Zen Community of Oregon, "It asks us to undertake deep listening, to listen as we never have before, to listen not only with our ears but with our entire being, our eyes, our skin, our bones and our heart." Wisdom or bullshit? You decide. But first consider this: what does the word "sound" mean?

This brings up the old (and boring) philosophical "riddle," "If an Oldsmobile backfires and no one (human, squirrel, whatever) hears it, does it make a sound?" This is no riddle. The backfire creates compression waves—not sounds. Sounds are things that ears and brains turn compression waves into. So no: no hearer, no sound.

Similarly, there is no sound of one hand clapping. The question would be better posed: "What is the effect of one hand clapping?" Ah! This is a question I can sink my teeth into. To understand, however, we must first acknowledge that there is no reasonable question here. It is very much like asking, "What is the orange of one apple?" It is a nonsense question—but one that raises important sensical questions.

There is no sound of one hand clapping, because one hand cannot clap. What does this say about clapping? It requires two or more hands. The essence of the question is that clapping is a form of communication—an act or instance of transmitting. Because a hand is a complex thing, it can do many things alone. It can pick objects up, for example. The clapping question reduces the hand to a single function—this is helpful for the purposes of this discussion.

Just as a lone hand cannot clap, a lone person cannot live. It is only through our interconnectedness that we exist. We are both separate and inseparable. Without this interconnectedness, we are alone—we are our own universe. Thus, it is only through our interconnectedness that the universe exists. The sound of one hand clapping is loneliness. The sound of one hand clapping is nihilism. The sound of one hand clapping is nothing.

If this answer makes no sense, take two aspirin, and call me in two decades.

Today, I need to discuss the defecation and urination processes. I stress the word "need" because I really don't want to. These days, I always carry a small bottle of hand sanitizer for general uses, but particularly so that I can get out of public restrooms; there is the old question about how one gets out of such a place; after washing your hands, you still have to open the door; answer: wash hands, open door, sanitize. Am I starting to sound a little crazy? Read on.

Close the Lid

Public restrooms are particularly bad places, regardless of how clean they appear. In the United States, over the past year, I recall seeing only one toilet that had a lid. Many people have studied the resulting spray from flushed toilets. The first study I heard about was over twenty years ago, but I can't remember it now, but thankfully Sarah Tan has written a nice online article (probably for a class), Think Before You Flush or Brush; it is a disgusting subject, but she deals with it tastefully (mostly).

For me, this is personal. I don't like being covered in fecal matter. Even more: I don't like brushing my teeth with fecal matter. Even the idea of urine on my toothbrush makes me sick. So unless you are into that kind of thing (and I know some of you are), close the lid! And if you are in a public restroom, get fully dressed and flush and run.

Sit Down

An old joke...

Q: Why do dogs lick their balls?
A: Because they can.

Why do men urinate standing up? Because they're pigs. Even assuming that a man lifts the toilet seat, some fraction of his urine stream will end up on the toilet and the ground around it. Krok7 has done a few calculations on his blog in an article, The Physics Behind Toilet Seat Splatter (in truth, he doesn't do too good a job--I think he greatly understates the problem, but you get the idea). Yes, I know that urine is not so very disgusting, but it does have an unpleasant oder—especially as time goes on.

One of the comments to this article states that it is not practical to ask guys to sit down while urinating. Why is this? Don't we sit down when we defecate? Are we so much more busy than woman that we can't spare that extra 30 seconds in the bathroom. For God's sake men, just sit down and shut up.

Gargantua

I am not alone in thinking about such matters. The 16th Century French writer Francois Rabelais thought about it a lot too. There is no doubt that he was the Joseph Heller of his day. I'm sure people couldn't stop laughing while reading any of his five books Gargantua and Pantagruel. And I even find him funny sometimes. But the basis of most of his comedy is repetition. Case in point: Chapter 13 of Book 1.

In this chapter, Gargantua tells his father, Grangousier of the many things he used to clean his anus: 57 all told (really: all told). The satire is not lost on me; Rabelais makes it very clear when Gargantua uses a lawyer's briefcase to clean his behind; or all the live animals he uses; or women's clothing: "Once I mopped my scut with the velvet scarf of a damozel. It was pleasurable: the soft material proved voluptuous and gratifying to my hindsight." [Caveat]

Despite all this hilarity, I do believe Rabelais was serious about the question of how one goes about keeping one's anus clean. He does not provide a very good answer: the neck of a (I assume live) goose. But then, he did not have the luxury of a bidet. Then again, neither do I.

Howard Stern's autobiography lists his approach (not surprising): three swipes with toilet paper and you are done. He does not go into details, but I believe he does this because he has learned from experience that making too many swipes will result in skin irritation if not bleeding. Despite the fact that all of this makes me very uncomfortable, I will propose my own solution.

A Clean Wipe

I suggest getting a small Tupperware container filled water as well as a hand sanitizer dispenser. Place them near your toilet. Remove the Tupperware lid. Make a couple of swipes with dry toilet paper. Wet a wad of toilet paper and make another swipe. Finish with one last dry wipe. Sanitize your hands and replace the lid on the Tupperware container. Sans a bidet, this is about the best you can do.

I am sorry about all this, but I do think that Francois would approve.

Okay, let's get this out of the way. My first experience with Internet radio was with Last.fm. And I know there are many others: Deezer.com, Mee Mix, Musicovery, Play It, Slacker, as well as many other similar kinds of services. I really liked the way that Last.fm worked, but it stopped working for me, so I switched to the Music Genome Project and Pandora.

It is nothing new, but if you aren't using it, you should be. I've found so many great artists this way. Just tonight, I discovered Pink Anderson (the Pink of Pink Floyd) and the Red House Painters. I feel a little ashamed that I only discovered them tonight, but I can't be smart all the time. Red House Painters came up right after I entered American Music Club as a new station. I discovered Anderson on my Old Blues stations that I have been tinkering with for a good six months now.

The great thing about Pandora is that I use it while cooking and sometimes (every night) someone comes on who causes me to stop everything and find out more. And, of course, it is good for commerce, because I just bought three new CDs (sorry folks, I still like CDs—and albums; I bought Presenting... Julie Andrews and the first John Prine album last night) because of what I heard on Pandora tonight.

The bad side is that I heard The Kid With the Replaceable Head by Richard Hell and the Voidoids. This made me think, "I should really get Destiny Street again—more because of the liner notes than anything (it isn't as good as Blank Generation) because Hell makes it clear whose guitar solos are whose (not that I really need to be told; Ivan Julian is a better guitarist than Robert Quine—I just think Quine is more creative, which is not a slam against Julian; he's great and enormously under-rated). But the only copy available is almost $100. I suppose that isn't so bad when you consider that you can't find my second book (now out of print) for less than $100—usually around $150). I don't even own a copy!

Update: 25 July 2010

Destiny Street has dropped to $30, while by book has gone up to $200 used or $400 new. One good bit of news: I found out that the book was not dropped; the publisher just went out of business.

It is surprising that the death of J. D. Salinger should get so much press this week when he died over 45 years ago—on the publication of his last short story in The New Yorker.

Okay; so maybe his heart was still beating and maybe he was continuing to be an asshole to his wife, but as far as I'm concerned, he died that day, and I don't give a fuck if it took another 44 years, 7 months, and 8 days for his heart to stop beating. I don't get it, and for that matter, I don't get the reverence that people show towards him and The Catcher in the Rye. It just isn't that good a book. I think of it like Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Neither are good, but both are held in high regard.

I suppose it has something to do with the fact that both books speak to young people who don't know much about literature. It is like kids who heard Pat Boone singing Ain't That a Shame who thought that it was rock-n-roll until they heard the Fats Domino's original. They just don't know no better. I will grant you that Salinger was an extremely gifted writer and I would much rather read him than I would Kerouac; but Kerouac was the real deal; Salinger was the poser and I think that is why he didn't publish anything after his literary death: he knew if he kept writing, people would realize that his early work was more style than substance and that he would suffer the same fate that later befell Susan Eloise Hinton.

But why not just admit that you are a Truman Capote? Why not admit that you are a fine writer, not a prophet. As it is, Tolstoy left us only two great books (with almost 25 more years and many fewer distractions) because he was too wrapped up in being a Great Man. Both Salinger and Tolstoy will go down in history as great men, while Capote will go down in history as an asshole. But what does that matter? Capote provided me with more pleasure than those other two combined.

So I'm not sad that J. D. stopped breathing yesterday. I am sad that he stopped publishing 45 years ago. I'm sad that I didn't think Catcher in the Rye was a good book when I read it as a young man. And most of all, I'm sad that I'll have to go out tomorrow and buy it (because my copy has inexplicitly disappeared) and read the damned thing again to see if maybe I was wrong about it.


The Onion

The Onion has written more eloquently about J. D. Salinger than I ever could. Understanding that there has been a lot of Salinger fan fiction written will make the following article particularly funny:

New Terminator Movie Brings J.D. Salinger Out Of Hiding

Understanding that Holden Caulfield (the main character of The Catcher in the Rye) calls people "phony" will make the following article particularly funny:

Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger

Andrea sent me a second link, as if I have nothing better to do than sit around watching TV. This one is to the pilot episode of the long-dead BBC sitcom Black Books. As usual, Andrea has rather good taste; the show is very interesting and funny. It tells the story of a group of people who live and work around a small used bookstore in London. Think "Hot l Baltimore" and you get the basic idea. It has some distinctly surreal elements, however; it reminds me of Stella only far more accessible. It is worth looking at. (Plus it is a chance to see Rupert Vansittart in a small role playing a part that is slightly less awful than usual.)

I haven't watched Saturday Night Live for at least a decade. But when Andrea told me that last week's episode with Carls Barkley (Season 35, Episode 11) was very funny, I figured that I would waste an hour watching it.

1. I thought the opening about Yemen was a bit racist, but still very funny.


2. The insurance company commercial was fun.


3. Reel Quotes was very funny, but I thought it could have been smarter (which would have made it less funny).


4. MacGruber I was delicious—a simple idea well executed.


5. The bimbo skit? What was with that? I get it, and I assume that the character is recurring; but it just doesn't work very well. But then, the joke with such characters is that they are people we laugh at—people we are better than. It rarely works; the only exception I can think of is Julia Sweeney's Pat, which transcended this limitation because the more we saw her, the smarter he got.


6. MacGruber II was pushing it, but pulled it out in the end.


7. The NBA game broadcast with the kid? I don't know: sort of funny, I guess.


8. MacGruber III was good. They took a clever idea and pushed it much too far. The fact that they ended up with silly instead of annoying is an indication of their talent.


9. Weekend Update was weak, I thought. The James Carvell bit was good; the Nicholas Cage bit seemed more like Keanu Reeves and was pretty stupid; the David Paterson bit was kind of funny and the guy does him well, but it struck me as kind of cruel.


10. The Haney Project was fun, mostly just because Barkley was so good natured about his reputation.


11. The Alicia Keys bit really didn't work for me. It is a funny idea, but I'm not sure how it could be made to work. It did one thing that few SNL skits ever do: it had a good ending. I tend to think that the problem is not with the writing; it is either the acting or me.


12. The Scared Straight skit was amusing. I guess the actors were a bit punchy by that time, because most of them lost it at one time or another. It bugs me a little bit that both the guys were black; if Will Ferrell were in the cast, I'm sure he would have been part of it--it's his style; and that would have made it a little less offensive.


13. Barkley's Bank was very weak. Again, it is nice that Barkley is okay with his rep, but the skit didn't do much; and given the potential, that's a shame. They will usually throw weak stuff to the end on the assumption that fewer people will be watching and that they may not have time for it anyway. I had hoped for a MacGruber IV, but I was disappointed.

Overall, the show was much better than I would have thought. But I will probably go another decade before I tune in again.

When I was in Mexico recently a few people asked me if I was a padre—"a priest" one helpful questioner translated for me. I like the idea of people thinking that I'm a man of the Word. Yes, it is true that my spiritual believes are what people charitably called atheistic. Yes, I am a hopeless moral relativist. Yes indeed, when my friends speak kindly of me, they say, "But he's our nihilist." All these things are true, but I have one thing that qualifies me to be a prophet: I am a man of the word—and most people don't pay enough attention to notice issues of capitalization.

I believe people thought that I was a priest for three reasons. First, I am a gringo and I saw no other in my time down in the southern part of Mexico. Why would a sober white man be slumming it as I was? Second, I wear almost exclusively black. They seemed to associate that more with the clergy than with the Beat Generation. And third, I was studying a big, hard-cover book. They thought it might be a bible.

In these post-modern times, it does seem to be the case that adults do not read books. Those who do usually read relatively thin, paperback books. Large, hardback books are not read; they are studied. And in general, that is the case. There is usually a reason I am reading any given book—it isn't just for pleasure.

For example, let's look at today's loot:

The Chicago Manual of Style 15th Edition This is definitely not light reading, but it is highly pleasurable—because I'm weird that way. I plan to wax poetic about it in my next blog entry.

The Works of Rabelais I am working on an article about anal cleansing, so of course I have to read Gargantua and Pantagruel. You do see that, don't you?

Don Quixote (translated by Edith Grossman) and Don Quixote (translated by Charles Jarvis [sic]) In addition to these two translations, I have ordered four more. This all has something to do with something that ends in my reading Don Quixote in Spanish. That is to say that there will be more than one article involving this reading.

There is (more than?) an element of religious zealotry about all of this. I do want to bring the Word of Cervantes (indirectly via his translators) to the masses—or some subset. People ought to be warned, and if they mistake me for a man of the Word rather than a man of the word, that's probably good enough.

I always thought that I liked kids, but I have come to the conclusion that this is not the case. If there were no children, no one would have made The Princess and the Frog. If no one had made it, I would not have spent the afternoon watching it. If I had not spent the afternoon watching it, I would feel better about myself. It isn't that I didn't enjoy it; some of it was very funny and I was on the verge of crying pretty much from beginning to end—and I didn't even realize that Oprah Winfrey was in it. But that is exactly the problem.

Randy Newman shows once again that talent can be used for evil. The songs—pretty much without exception—suck. But that's okay. Newman has been writing poor songs on and off since the beginning (think: Laughing Boy) and always since about Toy Story (think: You've Got a Friend in Me). It was his score that was so evil. I was emotionally bruised (and worse, but I don't want to go into details). I should now be made to weep over a dead firefly's romantic life.

What bothered me most about the film was how it dealt with race. It takes place in 1930s (give or take 20 years) Louisiana, with its accompanying racial segregation and economic stratification. The fact that all the black people were smiling didn't make me accept the racist expectations of the whites any better—from the implicit racism of Big Daddy LaBouff and his annoying daughter to the explicit racism of the real estate agents. What's more, I couldn't get past the fact that Prince Naveen is vaguely Indian and thus brown and thus acceptable to be paired with the light-skinned black girl. Certainly the prince could not be pasty-English white and the girl be Miles Davis black; or visa versa. If this is a film for kids, then perhaps such delicate racial issues should be taken out of it, by setting it somewhere other than 1930s (give or take 75 years) Louisiana.

It seems like a minor thing, but it's worth mentioning: the animation. This film is what they call "hand drawn". By this, it seems what they mean is that the base artwork is hand-drawn and then scanned into a computer and then animated the way they always do. Off hand, I would say, "So what?" But there is a difference: it really isn't very appealing. I guess they are going for something like "Lady and the Tramp". The problem here is that "Lady and the Tramp" is really not that appealing. I'm a Pinocchio guy.

Kids: there were a bunch of them. And they seemed to like it a lot. And they were very well behaved. (When I saw Babe in the theater the little joys were running up and down the isles.) I guess I can accept the occasional Disney movie for their benefit, but why did the dead firefly's romantic life have to be so sad?

I agreed to make dinner for five on Christmas day—not so much because I wanted to, but because I wanted to have prime rib for dinner. It turned out to be twelve people, but the bigger problem was that I created a four-course menu and had a wholly unsatisfactory kitchen. It was stressful and the results were so-so; but it worked. Many thanks go out to Brian Pricer for his amazing taste buds and invaluable help

Ceasar Salad

For this I used a standard recipe that I mostly ripped off from a magazine without a cover. I've made it before, but this time it was utterly disappointing. This can be attributed to the fact that I used a tube of anchovy paste instead of making my own. Learn from my mistakes: always make your own anchovy paste. I don't like making anchovy paste; the smell of the anchovies makes me gag, but this is a small price to pay for an acceptable Ceasar.

Cream of Tomato Soup

This may seem like an odd choice, but I thought it was a nice link between the salad and the main course—maybe because I love cream of tomato soup and have been searching for the perfect recipe for the last fifteen years and this represented an excellent opportunity to experiment. For me, this was the high point of the meal. The previous day, I made the recipe and it wasn't so good. I made a few changes—a big one from Brian—and it made all the difference. Here is the recipe. It is based upon an idea from Cooks Dot Com to use cream cheese rather than heavy cream. (Actually, it had a fair bit of heavy cream too; I can't help myself.)

Main Course

I am too suceptible to the opinions of others—at least it comes to cooking. As a result, the prime rib (11 pounds!) ended up being over-cooked by about a half-hour. It was still very good; you can't really make a prime rib that doesn't taste delicious.

With the beef, I made an artery-clotting Asiago and Sage Scalloped Potatoes using an online recipe (it has errors in it, so if you try it, study it first and figure out how you will deal with them). It was very good, but it really needed more cooking time. In general, I prefer to have scalloped potatoes twice baked; I should have done that this time.

Finally, there were Julienne of Fresh Snow Peas and Carrots. I started with another online recipe, but my early experiments did not inspire. In the end, I added a little ginger (I like ginger a lot) and replaced the olive oil with grape seed oil (another suggestion of Brian's). The grape seed oil made all the difference; it was great.

Dessert

For dessert, I had planned to make a cheese cake. Brian stepped up, however, and did the dessert for me. He made a cheese cake that was not exactly to my liking; I think mine is better, but it was still delicious; you can't go wrong with four pounds of cream cheese and a pound of sugar, right? But he also made a pumpkin pie that also included two other squashes. It was by far the best pumpkin pie I have ever tasted. It was amazing. I will get that recipe if I can and post it on Recipes.

In the end, at least it was an interesting dinner. And I didn't have to eat turkey. And I learned a bit about managing a large dinner. And then I collapsed.

What is with these "You're a loser but I love ya, babe" songs? The classic is Midnight Train to George, but I'll let that one slide because it is totally kick-ass. What I have in mind is Please Come to Boston. Here is the last verse:

Please come to L.A. to live forever
The California life alone is just too hard to live
We'll live in a house that looks out over the ocean
There’s some stars that fall from the sky, livin' up on the hill

That's beautiful. First, he asks her to come and live forever. Then he tells her that he needs her—life is too difficult without her. Finally, he has a house on the ocean and stars fall from the sky!

And what is her answer? "No. I love you, but not enough to leave beautiful Tennessee. I'll be waiting here for you to fail and come back with your tail between your knees."

On second thought, why don't you just stay in Tennessee and marry a tobacco farmer.