What I did in the war
5 - 8 August, Ian
Why is it that being able to survey a vast
distance is so relaxing? Certain ocular muscles relax, I suppose, but there's
more to it than that. Evolutionarily, you can see the benefit of being able to
see people approach from afar, but there's no knowing that someone wont wallop
me from behind.
From the lounge here, or better still from the deck, the view, as I think I've said, sweeps out well into the distance; I don't know how far but there are mountains that are now in clear view over 100 miles away. I can't see Mount McKinley from here, although you apparently get a decent view from the university campus. Even so, the mountains we can see rise above 14,000 feet. When I wrote my first blog from here these were occluded by the smoke from forest fires. Since then the air has cleared and the view has been better, though the way it clears is unpredictable: rather than getting generally more or less clear and correspondingly revealing grander or further-off mountains, the set of particular mountains that you can see at any time varies in no apparent sequence; they pop up and disappear all across the horizon.
These past few days we've checked out a few of the sights in Fairbanks. On Friday we went to the Museum of the North at the university (where we didn't see Mount McKinley). They have plenty of stuffed animals (bears, polar bears, sea birds, moose, bison) and interesting displays. We took an audio tour, which has the welcome and uncommon characteristic that it's easy to choose the order in which you move around (you just enter the number of the display place you're looking at), rather than the more common arrangement where you have to traipse round a set route. I like this way of serving up the information: it's more respectful. They had plenty of gear that I'd call Eskimo stuff, though I'm sure that's not an adjective that they're unrefined enough to use much, referring instead to specific native peoples. Whatever. It was sweet in the way in which they butchered the stinking intestines and hides of seals and caribou to make garments that they prettily decorated with patterned hems.
At the museum I also discovered that the biggest recorded earthquake in North America took place five days after I was born, in Alaska. It had magnitude 9.2 and liquefied the soil under Anchorage.
Yesterday Paula and I realised, around lunchtime, that it was our anniversary. Oh well, at least we both forgot. (We did both remember a few days ago but with the abnormally long days and the changing time zone and everything...) In the evening we all went to see Wedding Crashers at the cinema downtown. It's a standard US genre movie: beautiful people, unequivocal goodies and badies, the nice people ending up happily together, sex and romance, lots of gags and set-piece comedy, nothing dark or unexpected, all-male POV... So quite fun in a don't-need-to see-it-again kind of way. It was also totally unsuitable for the girls, or at least for Heidi (I'm sure that some of Zoe's friends will have the DVD soon). Given that most of the beer here generally has no discernible alcohol and that you can't get in a car without it binging to tell you that the handbrake is on and with it being illegal to walk across the street unless there are lines painted down to tell you it's okay, I'd assumed that an R-rated movie (kids must have an adult with them) would be good for an eight year old. This was a mistake: the redeeming thing about America is that sometimes it defies the stereotypes of itself that it strives to conform to and takes you by surprise. Like the cocktails in New York that make ours seem pathetic. Anyhow, the girls were untraumatised and kicked over their popcorn as gaily as they do at home.
This afternoon we went to Creamer's Field, which is a couple of thousand acres of ex-dairy farmland that's now turned over to wildfowl. They have mammals there too including a herd of moose, but we saw no more of them than tracks and droppings. The highlights were the cranes, which are there in abundance and that, as well as their bright red crests, have the most amazing call: Zoe described it as the sound that wood makes when you flex and then release it against a strip of wood that's fixed. My photo today is of a juvenile peregrine falcon (or so I claim) that we also saw:
I will do a moose snap next time.
I also finished Word Freaks (the book about pro Scrabble players) the other day. Paula and I have played quite a few hands since and despite not learning a material quantity of new words my play (as measured by my scores) seems to have improved considerably just from reading the book. This doesn't seem unreasonable to me since in my experience the way that we acquire skills is a two-D process. On the one hand you just need to acquire the raw knowledge (in this case the words); and on the other there's the business of learning the gestalt of the expert. For example, in languages as well as learning grammar and vocab (the knowledge) you also need a sense of the gestalt of the language's rhythms and cadences: the sort of noise to make. (As I commented numerous times previously, at my school we did the former to the exclusion of the latter, which is a poor way to try to learn.) Anyhow, maybe I get Scrabble a bit more now.
It's also caused me to reflect, since I'm not currently preoccupied with work as you probably are, on what it is I'm good at. This is not as easy to judge as you might think. For example, when I was at university coming up to my finals I could hit a 5 iron very sweetly and consistently because for some weeks or months I wandered across fields every day whacking golf balls to take my mind off studying. Now, though, when I often go for a year without playing, I'm usually pretty rubbish when I do get out.
I believe that the single discipline for which I have/had the most natural talent is the game of chess. I played, off and on, quite a lot when I was younger, representing five different counties as I moved around. I like the strategy and tactics of the game, and also the way in which it's time-limited: success doesn't fall to the person who ponders the Platonically perfect moves but to the person who is effective against the other guy on the day. But I jacked it in when I didn't have the time - a long time ago - and always intended to return to the game later in life. (I still do.) The realisation of what "having the time" meant came when the top player at the club I played for disclosed to me in a car journey to a match that he played a game or two from Informator (the dense Yugoslav digest of all recent top-level games) through in bed every night. The guy was married, and although I wasn't I didn't want to put in this level of commitment. I could see why he got to play a couple of boards higher than me.
The real-life characters in Word Freaks do make the big commitment to their game. Many of them are (or are portrayed as) the types of insecure over-achievers that we all know. The idea that you could be talented at something but not invest a lot of time in it reflects values that differ from theirs. So what is that we do value? What would you say? While we can quickly reel off family and relationships, which is simultaneously a perfect answer and a non-answer, this is another of those questions that it's difficult even to frame sensibly.
For many people - those for whom it's had enough just to stay alive - the consideration of how to focus your life on the things that you value the most must seem extremely decadent. But for those of us with a degree of political, societal and economic freedom we may as well reflect on how we use it. One approach is to think of memorable times (preferably good ones, I guess). What are yours?
Maybe they're with other people (the relationships thing). Maybe there's something special about particular situations (the pride of lions stalking along behind the zebra). Maybe at times things just seemed good (I had that nirvana sense when the hail started to lift and we came off the ridge of the cirque on our second and last full day of walking on the GR20 - not knowing that trouble still lay ahead on the wet rocks along the path down into the valley). Maybe you just did something well.
Is it helpful to think of life as like a basket in which we collect such moments? Or, more starkly, in which we collect achievements? It seems like a consumerist pathology when I write it like this, but there are some things that I do where I think, "I achieved this and no one can take it away". Like some academic achievements (getting 19/20 for an English essay off Roger Langley in the Fourth Form was one of my proudest achievements, if not one of my most useful). Or walking from one coast of England to the other. Even some professional achievements might count (maybe getting in the Risk magazine hall of fame, and what stood behind it). Hopefully, this year, taken as a single adventure, might end up being the best of them all, insha 'llah.
If people are placed on a spectrum according to how much the ability to showcase such achievements matters to them I think I'm somewhere in the middle: it's great, but not the point.
One of the reasons for thinking about this stuff is to decide what to do in the daytime when I get home: how do you go about making such choices? I think I'm pretty reasonable at what I do. I have, without doubt, much less talent at my job than I did at chess. However, I'm not too sloppy and I'm more accomplished at my job than I was at the game. When I played chess I only knew how to play like me. At my job I have a keener sense of what other people can do better, and how, and often I can use this. The fact that I can use knowledge of what I'm strong and weak at is part and parcel of being professional. It's surprising what qualities you can have or lack and still draw a decent wage. Clinton, for example, proved with panache that the morally relaxed could get to the top, and now GWB is showing that the indolent can also make it: laziness seems to be Bush's only attractive characteristic - he's spent something over 300 days of his presidency on vacation.
Maybe when I go back to playing chess one day my decline in recent experience and current knowledge will be partially offset by having a wider view of ways to play. (Actually, after some years off, I returned for one night only to win the club lightning (10 seconds/move) trophy, beating the Informator-in-bed guy en route. But that also was a long time ago now.)
Returning to work, as everyone keeps telling me, may be even harder than returning to chess. I shall return, I guess, partly for the money, partly for the people. But that isn't enough: my work, which some of you share, is too demanding to do just for the convenience of generating cash and seeing friends easily. I've spoken to several people (maybe even you) who are in that situation now (for some of whom it was a consequence of taking a break from work and then returning) and it doesn't sound great. It's also how I felt a little while ago: like a soldier in WW1 or Vietnam where the war was so absurd that nothing the army could do had any real meaning. (Pity the "war heroes" of Iraq.) It's obviously better to spend your big daytime hours on something motivating. I want to re-read the Foucault book about how the Greeks styled their personal existence around an aesthetic vision of how a life could be shaped. It's a terrific book and might help me get my head in line. Any of you worked it all out?
Back here in Alaska, Mike tells me that it's not only the northern-most and western-most state (even beating Hawaii to the latter, though parts of Hawaii are more westerly than parts of Alaska), it's also the eastern-most since the Aleutians cross the international date line. Mike also reports that Alaska has the biggest gender imbalance of all of the US states, with only 48% women, generating the quip that for the women here "the odds are good but the goods are odd".
Ian
From the lounge here, or better still from the deck, the view, as I think I've said, sweeps out well into the distance; I don't know how far but there are mountains that are now in clear view over 100 miles away. I can't see Mount McKinley from here, although you apparently get a decent view from the university campus. Even so, the mountains we can see rise above 14,000 feet. When I wrote my first blog from here these were occluded by the smoke from forest fires. Since then the air has cleared and the view has been better, though the way it clears is unpredictable: rather than getting generally more or less clear and correspondingly revealing grander or further-off mountains, the set of particular mountains that you can see at any time varies in no apparent sequence; they pop up and disappear all across the horizon.
These past few days we've checked out a few of the sights in Fairbanks. On Friday we went to the Museum of the North at the university (where we didn't see Mount McKinley). They have plenty of stuffed animals (bears, polar bears, sea birds, moose, bison) and interesting displays. We took an audio tour, which has the welcome and uncommon characteristic that it's easy to choose the order in which you move around (you just enter the number of the display place you're looking at), rather than the more common arrangement where you have to traipse round a set route. I like this way of serving up the information: it's more respectful. They had plenty of gear that I'd call Eskimo stuff, though I'm sure that's not an adjective that they're unrefined enough to use much, referring instead to specific native peoples. Whatever. It was sweet in the way in which they butchered the stinking intestines and hides of seals and caribou to make garments that they prettily decorated with patterned hems.
At the museum I also discovered that the biggest recorded earthquake in North America took place five days after I was born, in Alaska. It had magnitude 9.2 and liquefied the soil under Anchorage.
Yesterday Paula and I realised, around lunchtime, that it was our anniversary. Oh well, at least we both forgot. (We did both remember a few days ago but with the abnormally long days and the changing time zone and everything...) In the evening we all went to see Wedding Crashers at the cinema downtown. It's a standard US genre movie: beautiful people, unequivocal goodies and badies, the nice people ending up happily together, sex and romance, lots of gags and set-piece comedy, nothing dark or unexpected, all-male POV... So quite fun in a don't-need-to see-it-again kind of way. It was also totally unsuitable for the girls, or at least for Heidi (I'm sure that some of Zoe's friends will have the DVD soon). Given that most of the beer here generally has no discernible alcohol and that you can't get in a car without it binging to tell you that the handbrake is on and with it being illegal to walk across the street unless there are lines painted down to tell you it's okay, I'd assumed that an R-rated movie (kids must have an adult with them) would be good for an eight year old. This was a mistake: the redeeming thing about America is that sometimes it defies the stereotypes of itself that it strives to conform to and takes you by surprise. Like the cocktails in New York that make ours seem pathetic. Anyhow, the girls were untraumatised and kicked over their popcorn as gaily as they do at home.
This afternoon we went to Creamer's Field, which is a couple of thousand acres of ex-dairy farmland that's now turned over to wildfowl. They have mammals there too including a herd of moose, but we saw no more of them than tracks and droppings. The highlights were the cranes, which are there in abundance and that, as well as their bright red crests, have the most amazing call: Zoe described it as the sound that wood makes when you flex and then release it against a strip of wood that's fixed. My photo today is of a juvenile peregrine falcon (or so I claim) that we also saw:
I will do a moose snap next time.
I also finished Word Freaks (the book about pro Scrabble players) the other day. Paula and I have played quite a few hands since and despite not learning a material quantity of new words my play (as measured by my scores) seems to have improved considerably just from reading the book. This doesn't seem unreasonable to me since in my experience the way that we acquire skills is a two-D process. On the one hand you just need to acquire the raw knowledge (in this case the words); and on the other there's the business of learning the gestalt of the expert. For example, in languages as well as learning grammar and vocab (the knowledge) you also need a sense of the gestalt of the language's rhythms and cadences: the sort of noise to make. (As I commented numerous times previously, at my school we did the former to the exclusion of the latter, which is a poor way to try to learn.) Anyhow, maybe I get Scrabble a bit more now.
It's also caused me to reflect, since I'm not currently preoccupied with work as you probably are, on what it is I'm good at. This is not as easy to judge as you might think. For example, when I was at university coming up to my finals I could hit a 5 iron very sweetly and consistently because for some weeks or months I wandered across fields every day whacking golf balls to take my mind off studying. Now, though, when I often go for a year without playing, I'm usually pretty rubbish when I do get out.
I believe that the single discipline for which I have/had the most natural talent is the game of chess. I played, off and on, quite a lot when I was younger, representing five different counties as I moved around. I like the strategy and tactics of the game, and also the way in which it's time-limited: success doesn't fall to the person who ponders the Platonically perfect moves but to the person who is effective against the other guy on the day. But I jacked it in when I didn't have the time - a long time ago - and always intended to return to the game later in life. (I still do.) The realisation of what "having the time" meant came when the top player at the club I played for disclosed to me in a car journey to a match that he played a game or two from Informator (the dense Yugoslav digest of all recent top-level games) through in bed every night. The guy was married, and although I wasn't I didn't want to put in this level of commitment. I could see why he got to play a couple of boards higher than me.
The real-life characters in Word Freaks do make the big commitment to their game. Many of them are (or are portrayed as) the types of insecure over-achievers that we all know. The idea that you could be talented at something but not invest a lot of time in it reflects values that differ from theirs. So what is that we do value? What would you say? While we can quickly reel off family and relationships, which is simultaneously a perfect answer and a non-answer, this is another of those questions that it's difficult even to frame sensibly.
For many people - those for whom it's had enough just to stay alive - the consideration of how to focus your life on the things that you value the most must seem extremely decadent. But for those of us with a degree of political, societal and economic freedom we may as well reflect on how we use it. One approach is to think of memorable times (preferably good ones, I guess). What are yours?
Maybe they're with other people (the relationships thing). Maybe there's something special about particular situations (the pride of lions stalking along behind the zebra). Maybe at times things just seemed good (I had that nirvana sense when the hail started to lift and we came off the ridge of the cirque on our second and last full day of walking on the GR20 - not knowing that trouble still lay ahead on the wet rocks along the path down into the valley). Maybe you just did something well.
Is it helpful to think of life as like a basket in which we collect such moments? Or, more starkly, in which we collect achievements? It seems like a consumerist pathology when I write it like this, but there are some things that I do where I think, "I achieved this and no one can take it away". Like some academic achievements (getting 19/20 for an English essay off Roger Langley in the Fourth Form was one of my proudest achievements, if not one of my most useful). Or walking from one coast of England to the other. Even some professional achievements might count (maybe getting in the Risk magazine hall of fame, and what stood behind it). Hopefully, this year, taken as a single adventure, might end up being the best of them all, insha 'llah.
If people are placed on a spectrum according to how much the ability to showcase such achievements matters to them I think I'm somewhere in the middle: it's great, but not the point.
One of the reasons for thinking about this stuff is to decide what to do in the daytime when I get home: how do you go about making such choices? I think I'm pretty reasonable at what I do. I have, without doubt, much less talent at my job than I did at chess. However, I'm not too sloppy and I'm more accomplished at my job than I was at the game. When I played chess I only knew how to play like me. At my job I have a keener sense of what other people can do better, and how, and often I can use this. The fact that I can use knowledge of what I'm strong and weak at is part and parcel of being professional. It's surprising what qualities you can have or lack and still draw a decent wage. Clinton, for example, proved with panache that the morally relaxed could get to the top, and now GWB is showing that the indolent can also make it: laziness seems to be Bush's only attractive characteristic - he's spent something over 300 days of his presidency on vacation.
Maybe when I go back to playing chess one day my decline in recent experience and current knowledge will be partially offset by having a wider view of ways to play. (Actually, after some years off, I returned for one night only to win the club lightning (10 seconds/move) trophy, beating the Informator-in-bed guy en route. But that also was a long time ago now.)
Returning to work, as everyone keeps telling me, may be even harder than returning to chess. I shall return, I guess, partly for the money, partly for the people. But that isn't enough: my work, which some of you share, is too demanding to do just for the convenience of generating cash and seeing friends easily. I've spoken to several people (maybe even you) who are in that situation now (for some of whom it was a consequence of taking a break from work and then returning) and it doesn't sound great. It's also how I felt a little while ago: like a soldier in WW1 or Vietnam where the war was so absurd that nothing the army could do had any real meaning. (Pity the "war heroes" of Iraq.) It's obviously better to spend your big daytime hours on something motivating. I want to re-read the Foucault book about how the Greeks styled their personal existence around an aesthetic vision of how a life could be shaped. It's a terrific book and might help me get my head in line. Any of you worked it all out?
Back here in Alaska, Mike tells me that it's not only the northern-most and western-most state (even beating Hawaii to the latter, though parts of Hawaii are more westerly than parts of Alaska), it's also the eastern-most since the Aleutians cross the international date line. Mike also reports that Alaska has the biggest gender imbalance of all of the US states, with only 48% women, generating the quip that for the women here "the odds are good but the goods are odd".
Ian
Posted: Mon - August 8, 2005 at 08:35 AM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM