Toad in the Hole

Little-Known Autobiographical Fact

I actually had to go back to college, after I’d completed my AB in English Lit, to learn “Lefty Loosey, Righty Tighty.”

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Of Course

Nabbed from Heo Cwaeth, with thanks:

You scored as Grendel’s Mother. Vengence will be yours!  At least, it would have been if Beowulf hadn’t decided to take up the cause against you.  Here you are, decended from Cain, yes, but keeping to yourself in your fen, when they kill your son.  In revenge you go after one of the King’s best friends, which even they can’t fault you for.  Too bad blood feud was so popular in those days…In any event, you put up a tough fight, and nearly get the annoying little bugger before he snicked off your head. Grendel's Mother 75% Beowulf 67% The Dragon 67% Hrothgar 58% Grendel 50% Wiglaf 42% Wealhtheow 33% If You Were in Beowulf… created with QuizFarm.com

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BARD-o

I have very little to say about racism that I don’t expect someone else to say first and probably better. But I do have one exemplary experience to mention, and that’s about how it can sneak up and shock even expect-the-worst guarded old cynics like me.

A decade and a half ago, I apprenticed for a couple of dazzling years with the best tree man I’ve ever met, a local guy named Dennis Makishima. Dennis has since become rather more well-known, lectures all over the world, heads projects, gets called to consult with the big-tree hotshots, all that. But even then he was known locally as the best gift you could give to your landscape tree. He uses a combination of traditional Japanese landscape and bonsai methods and the more recent and scientifically informed work of Alex Shigo. He’s also incredibly generous with his time and energy. I got bazillions of dollars’ worth of training for absolutely free. He didn’t even make me (or any of his students—he’s taught a number of them and still does) start with sweeping up the debris in the traditional Japanese apprenticeship’s fashion.

What he would do with students he’d accepted was take us with him to selected clients’ trees, and let us work on a particular tree under his supervision. So I’d go up to his house and we’d go somewhere in his old Toyota pickup or sometimes in his bigger newer Ford pickup, depending on, well,  I still don’t know for sure, maybe the amount of debris we’d have to haul away.

He’s about my age, and then we were both in our early 40s. I am by no means good-looking, and for this work I generally dressed in jeans and a Tshirt, hardly glam. Dennis dresses similarly, is a balding and at the time yer-basic-moustached Japanese-American (obviously) guy, pretty ordinary-looking if you don’t know him. (Wish he’d grow that moustache again, it was pretty cool. Maybe he thought he looked too much like Pat Morita)

On one job he said he’d buy lunch at a handy not-quite-fast-food joint which, come to think of it, was just down the road from Chris Clarke’s. We had something Italian, as I recall, and talked trees —we can both get pretty wound up and yakkety with the right kind of stimulation. I was about as high as ever on the subject; I generally was that way on days when I went out on the job with him. Working on a tree puts me into a kind of excited trance, and so does learning about them in that hands-on fashion.

So, lunch over, back in the truck and back on the road. As we left the parking lot, a (like us) middle-aged white guy in another pickup was entering. He gave us such a look I was physically startled. I knew what it was, though I hadn’t seen it often or in a long time—what John Howard Griffin in Black Like Me called “the Hate Stare.”

And it took me half a mile to realize why.

Where and when I grew up, Asians and people of Asian descent were pretty scarce. I do remember one Chinese laundry way downtown, so there must have been at least one Chinese family; and one newly arrived Japanese-American family who ran the local head shop, whose elder son was considered a hot date by the highschool kids a bit younger than me. He certainly was good-looking. I suppose there just weren’t enough of them for racism to apply—they were just exotic, at least to most folks, at least overtly. But I was, as I’ve said, naive then; I was shocked to the core when my dad stopped speaking to me for three days because I went out with an African-American guy. (I believe he was shocked at himself, too; he’d been fairly liberal up to that point. Funny.) So maybe there was stuff I failed to notice.

But this is California. I’d learned at least that much history even then, about anti-Asian stuff here; I must have known by then that Dennis’ older brother had been born in an internment camp. It just… wasn’t quite immediate, was something of the olden days, was some ideological ancient artifact, until that moment. In that moment, I figured out that what the guy in the other pickup saw was an Asian man with a white woman, and that was all that mattered.

I felt a very complicated sort of outrage in that moment. All else aside, that asshole was dissing my Teacher.

Dennis didn’t let us call him “sensei” but that’s pretty much how we all felt towards him. What he is is a sort of custom-made sensei for adult Americans, neither Lord nor Daddy. So, Teacher with a capital “T.” And this oaf, in passing, had presumed to insinuate his mealy opinion into that relationship… I felt soiled, and not even because of any sort of sexual inference the asshole might have been making. Ugh. Damn, is nothing sacred?

No, I guess, in the face of that sort of crap, nothing is. You might say history came alive for me in that moment—the way it might for a Valley Forge re-enactor who loses a finger to frostbite. Thanks but no, thanks.

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Oh, SAAAAAANNNTA…!

Flying Spaghetti Monster Hat!!!

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Am I Oversimplifying?

I confess I have one of those brainstem-deep pet theories* about how people get wound up** and talk about things. There’s talk of “living machines” that seems to underlie a lot of creationist nutbaggery as well as TV-level science explanation: the cell rotor and the sodium pump, just e.g. And there’s “information theory” that gets slathered all over things that it doesn’t help with at all, like sociology, as well as becoming opaque slang with such formulations as “genetic information.”

I suspect a lot of the fuzzy thinking about biology originates in these phrases too. And they’re metaphors, not descriptions. Animals and plants got described as machines in the age of machines—the years when people were widely exposed to mechanical brilliance, to steam engines and typewriters and doorbells and aeroplanes. Someone had discovered ways to apply energy and motion paths, reproduce in a crude fashion some of what they’d seen in other bits of nature, and accomplish what they wanted—move large objects and human bodies around, weave cloth, fasten cloth bits together with thread, whip cream. And that vision, that bit of reductionism, colored their vision so that for example animals became living machines.

But of course we aren’t machines, any more than we are shadows of a Platonic ideal. That’s just a metaphor.

So is “information,” as I understand things so far. Is what is “transmitted” (is that what’s happening, or is that just what it looks like?) in DNA actually information, or is it just something that acts like information, looks ot us like instructions? And insofar as you have “information theory” are you applying it to actual information, or to something that looks to you as acting like information? When it stops acting like information, will you notice? What will you call that?

Whatever we’re looking at, we’re looking through the lenses of our time and its ways of seeing. Better be careful with those metaphors. We can count on looking about as quaint as people talking about an excess of choleric humor to people in a few centuries, who, one hopes, will be looking differently at whatever we’ve left them to look at.

*I mean theories in the popular sense, of course—one step more vague than “hypotheses.”

** Hey! There’s one of those metaphors right there!

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