Category: Culture

What we can learn from our DNA


From the island of Gometra in Scotland. Photo from a trip in 2018. My DNA shows that my ancestors lived in places like this for 4,000 years. Click for high-resolution version.

The most important thing to know before choosing a DNA test is that there are three types of tests. They vary in cost, and each provides different information.

1. Autosomal DNA. About $100. This type of test looks at an individual’s DNA from both parents. It’s most effective for the past 300 to 400 years of ancestry. It estimates ancestry components, such as how much Germanic, Scandinavian, or African ancestry an individual has.

2. mtDNA. About $200. This is maternal DNA. Mothers pass it to all their children, but only daughters pass it on. It helps trace the path of maternal migration and contains information that can be traced thousands of years into the past. It does not provide ancestry percentages.

3. Y-DNA. Up to $500, depending on how many steps you want to sequence. This is paternal DNA. It is passed almost unchanged from fathers to sons. Mutations occur at a statistically predictable rate. It can show migration paths for thousands of years. It does not provide ancestry percentages.

Brick walls

When people research their ancestry through written records, things often get murky a few generations back. In the U.S., courthouse fires burned a lot of birth records and wills. Information on ship arrivals is incomplete. Amateur genealogists make a lot of mistakes. People often hit “brick walls” and can’t reliably trace a line any further.

My surname is Dalton. Records show pretty reliably that the first male Dalton arrived in Tidewater Virginia around 1699. His first name is not known for certain, but he’s known as “Timothy 1.” No one has ever been able to find records about exactly where he came from. For me, that’s a brick wall. We do know that his descendants migrated up the river valleys to the Charlottesville area, and then southward down into the Blue Ridge Mountains, where my father was born.

I recently bought an upgrade at FamilyTreeDNA to do the maximum possible sequencing on my Y-DNA. I waited more than two months for the results. The raw data is complicated, but now we have AI tools to help us interpret it. I use ChatGPT.

Because I have a great many genetic connections with Ireland, for some years I though that Timothy 1 might have come from Ireland. The new information from more detailed sequencing changes the story. Timothy 1 almost certainly came from northern England, probably Lancashire or Yorkshire. There are still a good many Daltons there.

Celtic to the bone

But here things get really interesting. I will never know their names or anything about their lives (other than what can be surmised from where they lived). But because Y-DNA is particularly useful for studying migration paths, we know where they lived for more than 10,000 years.

My paternal ancestors, then, were Celts. They arrived in Britain long before the Romans — around 2,000 BC.

Where were they when the wheel was invented, around 3,500 BC? They were almost certainly in the grassy steppes of Russia north of the Black Sea — maybe Ukraine. Much earlier, they migrated out of Africa and gradually spread across Eurasia. It was about 4,000 BC when they migrated through Turkey.

Thank you, wheel

It was the wheel that helped enable their migration westward into Europe. By 2,500 BC they had reached Germany and Poland. They probably crossed into Britain around 2,200 BC. Until Timothy 1 left for the American colonies, they lived in Britain for 4,000 years, most of that time in northern England. They were in Britain for the final stages of the building of Stonehenge.

Because of my love of languages and the history of language, the migration data allows some pretty accurate guesses about the languages they spoke. Working backward: English → (Early Modern English) → Middle English → Old English (Anglo-Saxon) → Brittonic Celtic (Cumbric/Common Brittonic; closest living cousin is Welsh) → Proto-Celtic → Proto-Indo-European.

Curse you, Iona

When were the poor souls Christianized? They probably were Christianized around 650 AD (or CE, as we now say). There were monasteries (such as Lindisfarne) that spread Christianity into northern England. It was in 635 AD when Saint Aidan came from the island of Iona (in Scotland) to found a monastery. I visited Iona in 2019, and I hated the place for the atmosphere of smug righteousness that clings to it. It was almost as though I realized, from somewhere deep in my genes, that the monastery at Iona had something to do with beating Christianity into my contentedly pagan ancestors.

They survived, obviously

Plagues and wars brought an end to many family lines. Between 1347 and 1351, the Black Death killed roughly 30–50% of England’s population. In some regions, mortality was even higher. My ancestors would have witnessed and survived the Norman Conquest — 1066. They probably took the Dalton surname between 1,200 and 1,400.

I can’t go home again

My first trip to Ireland was in 1996. As I explored the country lanes of County Kerry, drove over the mountain of Carrauntoohil, and looked out over the Atlantic toward Skellig Michael, again and again I had the feeling — this is home. It was some years later before I explored and thoroughly hiked similar terrain in Scotland. I’ve been all over England and much of Wales. As much as I love the Appalachian Highlands, it’s Ireland and the British Isles that feel most like home to me. Cows, the scent of the cool springs where milk is stored, cows in green pasture, heaths and bogs, the Atlantic crashing against rocky cliffs, potatoes, cabbages, oats, barley, hot soup, warm bread — I do believe these things are somehow implanted in our genes.

I’d move back there in a flash, if I could. But the realities of the modern world make that impossible. Timothy 1 could get on a ship and sail to America with no legal niceties to stop him. I can go back and visit, but the legal niceties are such that visas are good for only six months of a year.

If I could go back in time, I’d go find Timothy 1. He probably was a carpenter and small farmer. He probably didn’t inherit much. He probably heard that Virginia was a wide open land of opportunity (which it was). But I’d say to him: Please don’t do it, Timothy.

Note: ChatGPT 5.2 analyzed my DNA data and helped with the research for this post.

What a woke dog whistle sounds like

Paul Krugman links to this video in his Substack dispatch this morning — America will not die in darkness. The video has been watched almost 13 million times. Krugman writes about the video, “A few commenters on this video called it ‘woke propaganda.'”

It must be a terrible thing to be the kind of person who feels threatened by a group of happy young people singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” But they hear the subtext, I think, and even a slow and illiberal mind catches on to the implication that the lion is going to wake up. It’s a woke dog whistle.

Until now I thought that the original of this song was the 1961 version by the Tokens, which reached No. 1 on U.S. charts. But actually the song was composed in 1939 by a Black South African, Solomon Linda. The subtext, I think, has always been there. Linda grew up desperately poor under apartheid.

The theme of Krugman’s dispatch is that fascist blacksliding in the U.S. has been remarkably fast compared with other fascist backslidings. Krugman quotes Steven Levitsky on Hungary: “Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists. And in Hungary if you walk the streets of Budapest or other Hungarian cities, you will not find heavily armed masked men abducting people. That doesn’t happen in Hungary.”

The upside, as Krugman points out, is that the backlash in the United States has been huge and took the White House by surprise. We know now, months in advance, that Trump will try to stop or steal the November mid-terms. We also know now what will happen if he tries. It won’t just be Minneapolis that MAGA will have to reckon with.

Good riddance to you and your derp, David Brooks


Source: Wikimedia Commons.

David Brooks, in his column today at the New York Times, writes that he is leaving the New York Times after twenty-two years of conservative derp-mongering.

One of the reasons that Brooks galls me to the bone is that he is incapable of ever doubting that he holds the moral high ground. No matter how wrong he turns out to be, he never questions his conviction that he has the standing to school the rest of us on the righteousness of derp, and to complain about moral decline without a trace of irony.

Yes, Brooks turned on Donald Trump after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. But never for a minute did it occur to Brooks to doubt his reams of derp. Ever an elitist, he never imagined that 77 million non-elites would fall for what he himself had helped sell them for years. The Republican Party would restrain extremists, he said. The sublime moral fiber and righteous judgment of conservative leaders would prevent castastrophe, he said. As it turned out, Trump didn’t hijack conservatism. He only took it to where conservatism will always go unless something stands in its way. The institutions and elites that Brooks thought would make Trumpist extremism impossible in America instead collapsed instantly, and then submissively carried water for Trump, the law and the Constitution be damned.

The work of center-right discourse is a lot like money-laundering. Brooks’ entire career was about laundering the doings of the cunning and deceitful movement that got us to where we are today. He didn’t do that because he is corrupt. He did it because he is foolish.

Oh sure, his tone was always civil. Many fell for it — the idea that good prose equals good judgment. Over and over again, he got away with normalizing the right-wing movement, providing it moral cover, and scolding the left while ignoring the radicalization of the right. To Brooks, moral rot and moral danger were always to the left and never to the right. He probably was genuinely surprised upon finally seeing that it was just fascism all along.

And it’s not just Brooks. The entire center-right project, in all eras, has been the same, from Buckley to Kristol to Douthat. They all met the ongoing need for flattering self-interest and privilege with high-flown language. One could as easily program a center-right derp generator as a postmodern jargon generator.

In fact I asked ChatGPT to generate a David Brooks New York Times column. The first run sounded so much like Brooks that it probably would have made it through the New York Times’ editors with no changes. I asked ChatGPT to please include just enough parody that even a dense soul like David Brooks would recognize that somebody is making fun of him.

Center-right derp generator, David Brooks version

We are once again at an inflection point, which is to say a moment when everyone feels aggrieved and no one is entirely sure why. The left believes history is a spreadsheet; the right believes it is a vibe. Both are missing the deeper truth, which lives somewhere between a well-run PTA meeting and a pickup basketball game where the rules are politely enforced.

In recent years, we have developed an unfortunate habit of blaming “systems” for outcomes that are better explained by the quiet disappearance of virtues like self-restraint, neighborliness, and reading the room. Yes, economic forces matter — I’ve read at least three books that say so — but no society has ever tax-credited its way out of a character deficit.

What’s striking when you travel the country, as I do between airport lounges, is how hungry people are for moral coherence. They don’t want another policy white paper. They want to know why everyone is yelling and whether it’s still possible to raise a decent child without a graduate seminar in trauma-informed parenting.

Our public life has become performative, our discourse shrill, our certainties strangely certain. Social media rewards the dopamine hit of indignation while punishing the old-fashioned virtues of hesitation and mild confusion. We are all experts now, especially on subjects we encountered twelve minutes ago.

History reminds us — gently, but firmly — that flourishing societies depend on mediating institutions: schools, churches, bowling leagues, and whatever it was people did before streaming services. These spaces teach the essential lesson that freedom requires limits, preferably exercised voluntarily and by someone else.

The way forward will not come from radicalism or reaction, but from recommitment: to norms, to decency, to the radical idea that adulthood involves obligations. Progress begins not when we win arguments, but when we remember how to behave at hotel breakfast buffets.

Privilege (and the lack of it)


Virginia Woolf. Portrait by George Charles Beresford, 1902. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

We live in an era in which privilege and wealth are squandered on obscene levels of consumption and on domination and destruction — of institutions, of norms of justice and fairness, of ecosystems, of all the fragile things that we all hold in common. Things have not always been that way. Once upon a time, privilege could be used to build and sustain a shared culture, not to strip-mine it or to burn it all down, to strengthen institutions rather than to reduce them to instruments of profit and power.

What happened?

Watching the 2022 film “Benediction” left me very curious about the life of English poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967). That curiosity led me to a long biography of Sassoon (526 pages) by Jean Moorcroft Wilson published in 2003. I had expected that this book would become more a reference than something to read cover to cover, because the biography is a who’s who of an important period in English literature.

That’s the period of the Bloomsbury Group — Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes. Even more important (to me) than the Bloomsbury Group were the Inklings, of which J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were core members.

I find that I have continued to work my way through this biography of Siegfried Sassoon because so much of what’s intriguing is how these privileged people, who didn’t have to work, used their time. It was very different from how privileged people use their time today. Back then, privilege could be used to buy time, learning, and the freedom to take intellectual and moral risks.

Yes, much of that time was used for a constant, and sometimes exhausting, stream of socializing, some of it superficial. But it also meant that they met a great many people, and sometimes lasting friendships developed — Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster and Roger Fry, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. That kind of time and friendship did not exist in a vacuum. It was protected and made possible by institutions, especially the universities.

Another factor that stands out is how the privileged today and the privileged then used the great universities. Today the privileged use the universities to leverage their privilege to gain more money and more power — finance, law, and tech. Back then, two universities in particular — Oxford and Cambridge — were like engines that converted privilege into culture. Today, degrees in the humanities are at risk of going extinct, while universities are increasingly pushed toward creating wealth.

These failures amplify one another.

At the same time as the privileged few have become cultural toxins rather than cultural creators, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has grown ever greater. Back then, a D.H. Lawrence, who was the son of a coal miner, could find a path to recognition through hard-won education and patronage. Today, millions of families can’t afford to feed their children, let alone educate them or give them the time and the tools to develop their human potential. While the privileged run wild, the unprivileged never have much chance of coming to understand the causes of their condition or learning how to work together to do something about it. Nor do the privileged want them to understand the causes of their condition or to learn how to work together to do something about it.

For all their anger and discontent, the writers and artists of the early twentieth century still imagined better worlds, whereas our own moment seems preoccupied with just avoiding catastrophe. Dystopias make good literature (and movies) today, and for good reason.

I ask myself where the connections are between privilege (and the lack of it) and creating dystopias versus creating a better world. The only idea I can come up with is that the wrong people are running the world to suit themselves, while the rest of us are just trying to get by.

Yes, the writers of the early 20th century were privileged. But they also were builders, and they were on the top layer of their society. They foreshadowed and helped shape the precious few decades of human progress after World War II. Today’s elites are not cultural builders because the systems that reward them no longer value the things that an E.M. Forster, a John Maynard Keynes, or a J.R.R. Tolkien valued.

Privilege once made world-building possible. It was possible to very much like those privileged, world-building artists. Today, the privileged are all about owning the world and making the world better only for themselves. And they don’t have to care whether we like them.

R-r-r-r rumbledethumps


Rumbledethumps. Click here for high-resolution version.

Just as I was thinking about what to cook on a bleak midwinter day, a friend who lives in the south of France (who is Danish but shares my appreciation for British cultures) sent me a link to a YouTube video about making rumbledethumps. So I made rumbledethumps.

I have only two Scottish cookbooks. One, The Scottish Women’s Rural Institutes Cookery Book, sixth edition, 1948, does not mention rumbledethumps, but it does include a short recipe for making colcannon, which I believe is considered to be the Irish version of rumbledethumps. My other Scottish cookbook, The Scottish Cookery Book, 1956, includes a short reference to rumbledethumps among the potato recipes My guess is that rumbledethumps is so simple and so basic that no one really needs a recipe.


⬆︎ The Scottish Women’s Rural Institutes Cookery Book. Click here for high resolution version.


⬆︎ The Scottish Cookery Book. Click here for high resolution version.

I looked at a number of online recipes for rumbledethumps. Some sauté the cabbage along with the onions to precook it. Other recipes boil the cabbage. I boiled my cabbage to cut down on calories. But I suspect that much of the savoriness of rumbledethumps comes from lots of butter (or drippings) and salt. I used only a little butter and made up for it with olive oil. But in these old recipes, there really is just no substitute for butter (and lots of it), or drippings (and lots of it).

⬇︎ In the video, the cook pronounces the th in rumbledethumps as though it is a t. This puzzles me. ChatGPT says that TH-stopping is a normal feature of Scots. If so, I’ve never noticed it. Notice that he also rolls his r’s sometimes.

I wonder if I could make bubble and squeak from the leftover rumbledethumps.

Ink forever!


Click here for high-resolution version.

Keeping fountain pens in working order makes me realize how much time our ancestors must have spent maintaining their writing instruments. Monks, I believe, used pens made of feathers, reed, or bone. Fountain pens came along in the 1700s. But keeping them in working order still would have been a regular chore.

Eventually just rinsing the fountain pen’s parts aren’t enough to get the ink to flow again. The pen needs to be soaked to get the dried ink out.

The Epstein files

If you try to zoom out and consider the Epstein files from the planetary level, what do you see?

What I see is a global ultra-rich ruling class like nothing the world has ever seen before. The French Revolution was just a tempest in a teapot by comparison — one small country, with power so fragile that they all lost their heads in a few short years.

Oxfam says that the global top 1 percent possess more wealth than 95 percent of the world’s population. How did that happen? And it’s not just money and property that they own — it’s power, and entire governments. It’s probably safe to say that the top 1 percent also own more power than 95 percent of the world’s population.

No doubt they get away with 95 percent of their crimes. They’re used to that. They count on it. The Epstein files are a test of whether they can get away with crimes (and the cover-up of those crimes) that are so abominable that even the deplorables — who normally admire right-wing power — aren’t willing to ignore it.

The other thing is that, for all their money and power, they are pathetic, greasy, ugly little worms who buy young bodies to help enable their denial that they’re old and utterly undesirable, and that, without their money and power, they have less going for them than most of the homeless people living on the streets of San Francisco.

This is the story of our times, and the ball is in our court. How long will 1 percent of the global population be able to treat the rest of us like property? No guillotines would be needed. Just tax them to death.

Siegfried Sassoon


Jack Lowden as Siegfried Sassoon in “Benediction,” 2022

From Oscar Wilde to the present, there has been a continuous line of gay writers, all of them considered to be degenerate criminals until relatively recently, and all of them now vindicated as bravely many years ahead of their times — impeccably civilized in their subversiveness. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was one of the lesser known of these writers. The 2022 film “Benediction” has given Sassoon some of the attention he deserves.

The Scottish actor Jack Lowden, of course, is River Cartwright in the brilliant and ever-so-entertaining series “Slow Horses,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

Many of these writers knew each other. Gay writers living today are only a few degrees of separation from Oscar Wilde. These early 20th Century gay writers lived in dangerous times. Wilde’s trial started a dark cultural shift that lasted for sixty years. Scholars estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 men were charged with crimes up until decriminalization in 1967. There was surveillance, entrapment, trials, prison, exile, and suicide. Alan Turing, who was charged with “gross indecency,” the same charge that was used against Oscar Wilde, was only one of these. E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice was not published until 1979, nine years after his death.

Armistead Maupin and poet Gavin Geoffrey Dillard knew Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood and W.H. Auden were lifelong friends. Isherwood knew E.M. Forster. Siegfried Sassoon knew Robbie Ross (who was a loyal friend to Oscar Wilde until the very end). Siegfried Sassoon never met Isherwood, but he certainly knew of him. As a war poet during World War I, Sassoon was critical of Isherwood because he thought Isherwood was avoiding military service by remaining in the United States. Isherwood knew Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams.

Though almost all them were born to great privilege, they were not all of equal character. Lord Alfred Douglas, who betrayed Oscar Wilde, became an even greater jerk after Wilde’s death. E.M. Forster, on the other hand, would qualify as a saint, were it not for the Catholic church’s clock running about six thousand years slow. Christopher Isherwood was no saint — as is clear if you read Christopher and His Kind or watch the film “Cabaret” — though Isherwood lived a very different life after he came to the U.S. in 1939.


Christopher Isherwood (left) and W.H. Auden, 1939. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

After watching “Benediction,” I bought a copy of a 2003 biography of Sasson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches. I doubt that I will read the entire book; it’s a very detailed 526 pages. But it’s an excellent reference with a valuable index and large set of notes. “Benediction” doesn’t flinch at the gloom and embarrassing failures of Sassoon’s later years. I found it interesting, by the way, that my copy of the book, which I ordered from the U.K., had a previous life in the Hobson Library of the Joint Services Command and Staff College, which trains members of the British military.

I have known poet Gavin Geoffrey Dillard for more than fifty years. He is my oldest friend. Gavin lived in Hollywood for a good many years. Isherwood lived in Santa Monica. Isherwood was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1981 and died of it in 1986. Below are two photos that Gavin took while visiting Isherwood during Isherwood’s last years.


⬆︎ Christopher Isherwood, Santa Monica, California, c. 1984. Photo by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard.


⬆︎ Christopher Isherwood and Don Bacardi, Santa Monica, California, c. 1984. Photo by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard.


⬆︎ Gavin Geoffrey Dillard, Bethania, North Carolina, c. 1979. Photo by David Dalton. (For years, Gavin and I preferred twin-lens reflex cameras such as Yashicas and the Mamiya C330, which use square 620 film.)

For Gabriel

When you were an angel and I was a god,
Earthly-fair were the paths that we trod;
You, from your heaven of Saints at the Throne,
Banished, to wander, gold-haired and alone;
And I, from my pagan Paradise hurled,
Thro’ sun-shot cities of cloud to the world.

Humble you came, with your calm, clear eyes,
And parted lips; but your spirit was wise
With raptures of music and light that you’d lost …
So we loved and were happy, nor counted the cost.
For the gates were barred, and the way was hard
Up to the bastions of Heaven proud-starred;
And I was a god no more. But you sprang
To the peace of my arms … and an angel sang.

Unpublished poem by Siegfried Sassoon, dated 20 November 1918, included in Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches, 2003.

An obstinate ostinato in a time of oligarchy


Yamaha P-225 digital piano

Though in my younger days I had a piano for many years, it had been 20 years since I owned a piano. A rather large organ console now occupies all the musical space downstairs (not to mention the ten speaker cabinets upstairs). To have a real piano again was out of the question for lack of space. But I finally acquired the next best thing to a real piano — a pretty good digital piano. I put it in my bedroom, the warmest and best-lit part of the house during the winter because of the big gothic windows.

Even when I was well practiced and at my best, I was a humble intermediate-level musician. My limit was in technique, not so much my musicality. That is, I can hear better than I can play. Many times in the past I’ve gone several years hardly playing at all, and my keyboard skills fall apart. Still, there is something to playing an instrument that is like riding a bicycle. The skills never completely go away. A few months of diligent daily practice will bring it back. Recovering rusted technique is much quicker than developing that technique for the first time. I went up to the attic and found my piano music. After a few weeks of playing scales, over and over, for at least an hour a day, I should be able to once again relearn the pieces that I learned years ago.

Computer nerd that I am, I’m very interested in letting a computer (or just an iPhone) play the piano, using the magic of MIDI. MIDI files are easy to find on the internet. However, most of those MIDI files are computer-generated. They sound mechanical and lifeless. They hurt the ears. There are MIDI files played by human beings, though, if you can find them. The MIDI files are created on special pianos that record what the pianist does with great precision. When played back on an instrument such as the Yamaha P-225, it does indeed sound like a real person is playing the piano.

Between 2002 and 2018, Yamaha had annual piano competitions in which the players’ performances were recorded on a special Yamaha grand piano. Those competitions produced thousands of human-played MIDI files. The MIDI files disappeared off the internet, though. But with some digging I found that the files still exist in an internet archive. Also, a few dedicated souls retrieved all the files and organized them. I was able to find them, and I now have the entire library on my computer. Those who might be looking for those files can start here, at the internet archive.

I made another very useful discoverty. ChatGPT can read, edit, and write MIDI files. For example, in the Yamaha archive is a performance of Schubert’s Impromptu No. 3 in G-flat Major, Op. 90, D. 899. The pianist — probably a young one — pretty much murdered the piece by playing it too fast and much too heavy with the hands, particularly the left hand. That’s the kind of thing that can happen when a pianist has great technique but mediocre musicality. I had a fascinating discussion with ChatGPT about improving this performance. ChatGPT and I went through about ten iterations, in which ChatGPT made the MIDI changes I requested, and we ended up with a performance that is at least 75 percent as good as this performance by Khatia Buniatishvilli:

Many people have written about how to try to stay sane while the world is spiraling downward into fascism. Pretty much all agree that keeping civilization alive — even in small ways in our own homes — is an act of resistance.

Trump

Every day, the horrors seem to get worse. The Trump administration is trying to sell out Ukraine to Russia, with scum such as Jared Kushner in the middle of it, with plans to get rich off of looting Ukraine. Apparently Pete Hegseth gave a war-crime order to kill the survivors of a ship that had been blasted out of the water. Now they’re denying that Hegseth gave such an order, and they’re trying to throw an admiral under the bus for it. The new outrages have been so outragous that the media have temporarily forgotten Epstein.

There may be an upside. Republicans are starting to think about their political survival after Trump is gone. Trump has more than a year for more atrocities before a third impeachment becomes an option. Republicans seem to be learning that the political gains from ignoring Trump’s atrocities are starting to diminish. If Republicans have a brain, they’d support impeachment as soon as a new Congress convenes in 2027, and get rid of Trump for good. I’m not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, how about a sonata or two.

A musical note: The words ostinato (Italian) and obstinate (English) come from the Latin obstinātus. The Italian word dropped the “B” as Latin consonant clusters were simplified. In music, ostinato refers to a musical pattern that keeps repeating, obstinately, even though the rest of the piece may have moved on — for example, an ostinato bass note or bass line.

One of the best known examples of ostinato pattern is the bass line that repeats over and over all the way through Pachelbell’s Canon in D. Listen to the cello:

And here you can see these notes in the score:

And here is something from Philip Glass, the patron saint of ostinato, in this case obstinately repeating arpeggios:

The unenchanted travel of the here and now


A medieval inn. Source: ChatGPT 5.1. Click here for high-resolution version.

It’s an odd paradox — to very much want to know what’s happening in the world, but very much not to want to be in that world. When you’re both introverted and old, like me, then all the more does one want to be away from the world. It’s why I live in the woods now. This almost certainly has something to do with why I no longer read stories set in the here and now.

It wasn’t always that way. Back in the 1970s, Armistead Maupin’s series of Tales of the City novels changed my life. They were very much set in the here and now, in San Francisco. Those novels were a big factor in my deciding to move to San Francisco back in the late 1980s. And by the way, by an unplanned stroke of fortune, I ended up at the San Francisco Chronicle, where Maupin wrote those novels in serial form in the Chronicle. I even, at last, met Maupin at an office Christmas party. By that time Maupin was rich enough from the novels that he no longer had to work at the Chronicle.

Still, the urge to travel has never completely left me, and I hope it never does. I’ve seen most of the places that I ever wanted to see, so it’s Scotland now that best suits my anything-but-the-here-and-now attitude. In Scotland, especially in certain places, the realities of today’s world can easily be imagined away — pubs, little villages, farmland that probably looked very little different 400 years ago, moors and bogs, castles, and the sea crashing against rocky cliffs. San Francisco suited me well when I was younger, but not anymore.

But: one has to get there from here. From where I am in the Appalachian foothills, that’s 24 hours or more of the most miserable sort of immersion in the here and now — the noise and discomforts of airports, being packed into airplanes, paying through the nose for a taxi or Uber ride, and sometimes an ugly and time-wasting layover in an airport hotel. No doubt this is inevitable in an era when people travel by the millions, requiring great efficiency. The economics of travel today, it seems, have been fine-tuned to keep the level of misery just short of the level at which people will refuse to bear it. The misery is twice as great on the way home, because everything that one was looking forward to is now behind rather than ahead. Though, to be sure, being home at last is awfully nice, too.

I was unable to find any new fiction that interests me, so once again I’m re-reading The Lord of the Rings. My favorite parts, really, are the traveling parts, especially in Book 1 when Frodo and friends set out from Hobbiton and travel cross-country to Bree and to the inn named the Prancing Pony.

I’ve often been curious about what travel was like in medieval times. There were Roman roads, of course, going in all directions from Italy into the heart of Europe as well as into Britain. There were a good many people on those roads, which means that there had to be a support system for travelers. For what reasons did people travel? How safe was it? Were there a great many inns, or too few? Who walked, and who rode? What kind of wagons and other conveyances did they use? Did they travel much during the winter?

It seemed very likely to me that scholars have a great deal of information about medieval travel, so I asked ChatGPT for suggestions. I’ve ordered a 1997 reprint of Norbert Ohler’s The Medieval Traveller. It’s an English translation of the original German, Reisen im Mittelalter.

I’m hoping the book will provide some fuel for my imagination — staying right here in the woods while traveling in my imagination, and not in the here and now.

Burlap! Camellias! Verdi!


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I regularly order wheat berries and hulled barley from Amazon, five pounds at a time, to grind into flour. This time the wheat came in a beautiful burlap bag. It’s a tiny burlap bag, but I haven’t seen a burlap bag in years.

My camellias are blooming. Camellias in bloom always make me think of La Dame aux Camélias, the 1848 novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, which I read in French some years ago. Verdi turned the story into an opera, La Traviata. It’s a tragic story, but Verdi included a happy piece, which also is a waltz.


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