At 52, there is still hope for me then ? Sponsorship or wait until retirement, that is the question.

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The subject of fish has come up several times recently - Tigris Carp & Salmon of (Doubt) Wisdom as wise advisors, BabelFish as a metaphor for language independent interoperability interface, and I had become convinced I’d heard of “talking catfish” somewhere before. I say heard of, because I was also recently thinking I was maybe hearing the local catfish amongst all the nightime noise of calling frogs, chuntering ducks, and chattering cicadas. An impression re-inforced when I caught a 3 or 4 pounder in the pond outside the front door and it growled at me.

Yes, this news story really does feature “Professor A. Bass” talking about coastal fish species Midshipmen and Toadfish that buzz and hum to communicate with each other. Trust me, he’s a scientist.

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It’s a long time since I qualified as an Aeronautical Engineer and worked on Tornadoes, Hawks and Harriers, and I’m still a sucker for plane-spotting - civil or military. At a time when civil aircraft are all increasingly scale-efficient clones of each other, and air-travel a politically-incorrect chore, driven by ecolo-econo-geo-political considerations, it’s a wow to see the F22 raptor perform (here at Farnborough). A bit of creative freedom, even if it is equally non-PC to be a fan of a military fighting machine.

The display video opens (very briefly) then later an extended sequence (at about 2mins 50) with some amazing slow speed manoevres - you have to keep your eyes on the cloud texture to see which direction the machine is actually moving - tumbling like a snowflake, as the caption says. Clever stuff. I may have to add the F22 to my list of favourite flying machines - F6-Lightning (EE/BAC), F4-Phantom, Mig-23, Harrier, A10-Thunderbolt, F14-Tomcat, and now the F22-Raptor.

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A week late blogging this but some things are worth capturing even if late.

Sylvia and I went to Nasville last weekend - 4th July, Independence day on the Friday. We booked into a cheap motel 8 miles, a cab ride, out of town off I40, so as not to have to worry about drinkand/or driving or driving back in the small hours to Hunstville.

So Friday evening we got a cab into the east side of Nashville, just in time to watch the fireworks from the grassed area alongside LP Statdium, across the water from Riverside Park, “behind” but very close to the main display, with the Nashville skyline as a backdrop. Excellent spectacle in four main parts - almost too much going on at once to take it all in at times - from the grond and from the air. Find those starbursts that put out the shaped coloured patterns - cubes, smileys, U’s, S’s & A’s quite surreal amongst the chaotic blitz of light, colour and noise. Breathtaking, and visceral.

We walked with the dispersing thousands through East Nasville to “The 5 Spot” - the reason we’d come to Nashville this particular evening - to see “Wess Floyd and the Daisycutters” - for the third time in my case, the first in Sylvia’s. Blogged before that I’d liked them on first encounter, but didn’t blog about the second time, which turned out to be a wash-out with only 3 of the band and precious few more punters at the gig. What that did mean was that I’d spent half an hour talking to Wess, Andy and Nathan at the bar, and bought a couple of their CD’s, before they agreed with the management to call the whole thing off, after having attempting a partial first set. Sad, but different.

To be fair with three bands on at The 5 Spot gig, complete with hangers-on, it wasn’t a big crowd this night in Nashville either. But with a cover to get in everyone was there to experience the performances - quality beats quantity. With The Daisycutters, of course you can’t get enough guitars, 4 plus the bass is their line-up.

They were as good as I’d remembered, even better with enough fans there to participate physically and enough who knew their songs to sing along, quite unlike the first encounter. And Sylvia loved them too. They were very friendly before and after and engaging during their set, all too brief since they were second on the bill. Amongst the fans was Heath Haynes, who also got up to Jam on their closing number.

The opening act had been excellent too. “Johnny Nobody” from Buffalo, NY. Simple well executed 3 piece with strong rhythms bags of energy and a little attitude, just enough not to alienate an audience. Sylvia and I both liked them, like the Vines she suggested. Bought their CD “What it Feels Like Broke” - we’ve been playing it to death in the car and in the home too.

Headlining were “Harrison Hudson”, another original three piece. More stylised image, a little too clever material for their ability to pull it off - three-pieces have to be really good or really simple to work, in my experience, not much margin for error. Not quite to our taste anyway.

So, why full circle ? Well the reason we came across the Daisycutters in the first place was through the their gigging with the Victrolas, and their connection to the Nashville-based Tommy Womack. With Heath Haynes having been in the Daisycutters crowd, we went across to Lower Broadway after the gig and finished the night in The Full Moon with Josh Hedley (Heath Hayne’s fiddle player) performing with The Travis Mann Band. Anyway after such a good Friday night we decided to stay up for the Saturday too - to see Heath Haynes at Layla’s. So glad we did. All of the Daisycutters in the crowd, and another great set from HH - all covers, as always on Lower Broad, but what a range of blues from country to rock - Roy Orbison to The Ramones. You just have to get up and dance.  Last time we went to see HH at Layla’s, with Robbie, HH was absent and Josh was fronting. No Rich Gilbert or Aaron Oliva this time either, but the coolest bassist we’ve seen in a while standing in for Aaron. Anyway, this time Sylvia discovered, her taste must in fact be heavier than she had previously realised. Visceral quality.

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[Caveat - this review doesn't do the subject justice, but I didn't really notice how good a read it was until I was well into it, by which point not only did I not have any notes, but I was committed to read on to a conclusion. So from memory ... ]

I’ve had a copy of Alastair MacIntyre’s (1981, 2nd Ed 1984) “After Virtue” tucked away on a bookshelf for some time. I vaguely remembered I’d bought it on the recommendation of Rev Sam, but no recollection of why it came to be tucked-away unread. [I since discover it's Sam's most important read ever - after being turned onto things philosophical by ZMM, like myself, and away from "scientism", as I already was before I read ZMM, "After Virtue" turned Sam to Christianity and theology. Wow. Matt too claims MacIntyre and After Virtue as an important route to understanding the Greeks.]

So, my atheistic reading of “After Virtue”:

Firstly, it is a read that requires some effort - it is in large part a scolarly review of the history of philosophy on the subject of morals & ethics - the virtues, from the pre-Socratics forward. That might make him a mere “philosophologist” in Pirsigian terms, if it weren’t that MacIntyre were clearly working towards his own agenda. The difficulty of the scholarly subject matter is copounded by MacIntyre’s somewhat pompous and knowing, even supersilious, style …  I regularly got the impression of dense passages concluded with intellectually-smart-ass summaries and even dismissals (pot & kettle here maybe ?). Anyway, with your wits about you, the effort seems worth it.

As a reformed Marxist, he shows great fondness for Nietzsche and Marx, but ultimately these moderns too are flawed when it comes to virtue. In fact although MacIntyre does develop his after virtue agenda, it is clearly just a start to be further developed in his later writings.

In essence he is describing the interminable debate on the best or right ontology of “the virtues” and their relation to the ontology / epistemology of existence generally. That is, not only has the history of that debate been interminable, it is in practice never going to be complete and consistent, and therefore doomed to remain unintelligible, without a missing ingredient. [Ref Tom's dissertation ?]

Nietzsche showed that as currently understood, all existing bases of morals were flawed, and his creative destruction was to sweep them all away. As I do, MacIntyre believes Nietzsche himself did not really provide a satisfactory alternative. MacIntyre uses his study of the Greeks to show that most interpretations of Aristotle which concluded that he too was flawed (haven’t we all ?), threw out too much of the Aristotelian baby with the bathwater.

Much of the history of the debate over the virtues is described - differences between doing the right thing for the right reasons, failing to do the right thing but for the right reasons, doing the apparently right thing but for the wrong reasons, and so on. The game theory of needing to predict human behaviour in order to decide one’s own behaviour - and all the Machiavellian twists that evolve from that. Reviewing all the Greek schoold of thought, mediaeval, rennaissance, post-enlightnment and modern schools - the index of references is a who’s who: Kant, Mill, Hegel, Marx, Nietzche, you name ‘em.

Sticking in my mind Jane Austen and T E Lawrence. The latter a speciality of mine, the former still largely a source of ignorance to me unfortunately.

The T E Lawrence reference is simply of ironic value to me. In fact MacIntyre only mentions TEL in the context of the wickness (or otherwise) of sado-masochism - whereas to me the TEL subject is that “it” - life, the universe and everything - “is (not) written” - the irony will become clear in the summary of MacIntyre’s thesis later.

A large part of the interminable historical debate on the virtues has been the relationships between them - whether it is possible to hold one virtue and not another - whether there really are virtues or simply virtue. Much of the discussion of the Greeks and other earlier commentators hinges on how imprecisely the linguistic translation of various words for various virtues can be unambiguous anyway. Where’s Wittgenstein when you need him ? MacIntyre draws heavily on the work of Jane Austen to illustrate the complexities of recognizing individual virtues in the lives of people who either are or are not virtuous.

To cut a long story about which philosophers got what right and wrong about rights and wrongs, I would summarize MacIntyre’s thesis as follows: So after virtues we get to virtue, and if even virtue is indeterminate, what after virtue … ?

All decision-making, expressed as well as in action & behaviour of (human) individuals and institutions, is done with intention in context.

In order for that decision-making rationale to be intelligible, to the participants and witnesses, they must be expressed as part of a greater “narrative”. A narrative with a beginning, a history, a middle, a now, a future, and an end. And that’s an end in every sense, place and time yes, but also in terms of telos, purpose and meaning towards that end.

So, we are all writing our local narratives, rationalizing our thoughts, intents and actions, in the context of some greater narrative.

That greater narrative is provide by a mythological tradition within a culture. Clearly therefore different cultures will maintain and evolve different such narratives, even though they will shared common features. The grand narrative - the tradition of moral virtue - is cultural.

Good governance, of collections of individuals in societies and institutions is really based on that moral tradition of virtue. The rules of politics and institutinal law are simply pragmatic issues of effectiveness and efficiency.

The grand narrative may be “written” by the tradition, to provide the context within which individual local narratives may then be written, with or without levels of creativity and freedom, but the local narratives are not themselves pre-written in the tradition. Those are indeed written by the participants.

It is clear that MacIntyre’s thesis is leading to the Christian tradition - he concludes that what we are really waiting for is “another St. Benedict” to lead us out of the “predicament of our times” - you should already know my view of that myopic “of our times” perspective. Clearly the Christian thesis is developed in his later work, so the argument is inconclusive as to which cultual tradition - but the argument so far is well made. I would guess his argument is going to be that the best tradition is the one that is best developed in your culture - they can’t be written on a blank slate.

We need a cultural tradition that provides a telos - a purpose and meaning to life. No amount of logic, objectivity, science or rationality can define the narrative mythological content of that tradition. It is written. Even a scientist has to take that on “faith”.

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Just read Saul Bellow’s “Dangling Man” his first book, written in 1944 - he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Picked-up on Bellow for the Chicago Uni connections, but otherwise no strong connection to my agenda in Dangling Man - references and allusions to Goethe and Dostoevsky abound.

Joeseph, is the man dangling in limbo after having signed-up for Army service, awaiting his call to duty, with freedom to think, write, do anything in fact limited by his domestic situation and resources, and the indeterminate window of time. After much reflection on life, freedom is cancelled by notice of his call-up.

This is my last civillian day. Iva has packed my things. It is plain that she would like me to show a little more giref at leaving. For her sake, I would like to. And I am sorry to leave her, but I am not at all sorry to part with the rest of it. I am no longer to be held accountable for myself; I am grateful for that. I am in other hands, relieved of self-determination, freedom cancelled.

Hurray for regular hours ! And for supervision of the spirit ! Long live regimentation !

Saul Bellow, “Dangling Man” (1944)

I also have Bellow’s 1982 “The Dean’s December” and I guess I should also read his 1964 “Herzog”.

Still need to finish Chris Wilson’s “Healing the Unhappy Caveman” - blogged my incomplete review earlier with a long comment thread with the author. A job for this weekend, but first I need to review another important read. Next post.

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Interested in this news story from our position here in Huntsville, AL. The NASA Space Shuttle timetable formally announced now up to the final mission on 31st May 2010.

Follow the links to the NASA Constellation / Ares / Orion project.
The Huntsville connection ? Wernher-vonBraun / Operation-Paperclip / Redstone-Arsenal / Marshall-Space-Flight-Centre / Apollo / Saturn I & V and now the J2X engine to power Ares V.

Interesting on the MSFC home page to see the obituary of Ernst Stuhlinger, vonBraun’s No.2, who died recently 25th May 2008 aged 94. This lively old boy made an impression on Sylvia when she met him last year, amongst another things waxing philosophical about the ironic sign o’the times changing for the better as he considered that the doctor working to prolong his life in the 21st century … was Jewish.

Interesting also to see also the SpaceX / Falcon / Dragon project may run privately-funded space-station missions in the meantime - hadn’t noticed that before.

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We were discussing at an extended family meal week before last how the Godfather trilogy was quality drama - perhaps Godfather III being the weakest. Sylvia and I recalled and discussed it further for some reason over the weekend and noticed we had only a VHS recording of the trilogy, and no longer any video player - so we resolved to obtain a DVD set of the trilogy.

Night before last Godfather III was showing late, 2 hrs 45 mins ending about 01:20 on a commercial-free, free channel - so I watched it … out of sequence as it were. I guess it must have been some sort of director’s cut, becuase there were extended and additional scenes not quite how I recall them. It was and still is excellent.

That silent scream in the penultimate scene - haunting - more haunting than its immediate cause, the death of daughter Mary. Michael really had gone straight - as legit as a capitalist can be anyway - in the whole Part III plot. Every cross with the dark side was his being dragged back in by those still involved with the family history, and his involvement based on balancing duties. The touch points with real contemporary history add to the drama - God’s Banker and the election of Pope John Paul I and so on - like the Batista overthrow in Godfather II, but now I digress.

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It was 40 years ago today …
Cap’n Bob rode his bike away …
So let me introduce to you …
The one and only ZMM …

On the 8th July 1968 Robert Pirsig set out on the road-trip that became Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The rest as they say, is history.

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