Sakura

[ed. See also:  mono no aware (The "Ahh-ness" of Things)]

It is peak sakura — the short, spring season of cherry-tree flowering that so besots Japan. In Ueno Park in Tokyo, falling blossoms settle over the sleeping salarymen, recumbent on tarpaulins with traffic masks yanked down around their necks. Curtains of petals draw open and closed in the wind around huddled teenagers. The flowers land on bitumen and bare soil, sometimes drifting into the open food containers of gathered observers. A distracted child places a piece of yellow eel, festooned with sakura, into her mouth.

For all their abundance, these branches are more likely to produce the candied maraschino cherries used to trim cocktails than the grocer’s fruit with which we are familiar. Japan’s urban cherries are ornamental, neutered cousins of orchard varieties. Planted to mark out places or events of note, some of the trees are thought to be more than 1,000 years old. Despite their lack of edible fruit, for two to three weeks in late March or early April, the city’s cherries become the most important trees in Japan. The nation’s climatic range triggers a staggered cherry flowering — a ‘blossom front’ that is monitored by the Japanese tourism agency as it sweeps up from Fukuoka, through Tokyo and north towards Sapporo. The cherries, and late, slow-moving plum flowers, jostle as they race around the Japanese Alps (cold snaps advantage the plum buds). When the sprays of blossom finally break open through the capital, their momentum is as forceful as floodwaters returning. The cherries’ high, white foam pours through avenues that lead to shrines, into graveyards, over public lands, and then to the brink of rivers and lakes where great canopies of petals spread above koi fish the size of corncobs.

During sakura, families and other groups, from workplaces or social clubs, assemble to celebrate a tradition known as hanami: flower-viewing picnics. These picnics first flourished in the Heian period, and are featured in the 11th-century courtly novel The Tale of Genji. When the hanami are in full swing, it can seem as if Ueno Park — one of Tokyo’s most popular locations for the celebration — has become the staging ground for a hundred small re‑enactments of scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Young women in short crinolines, chalk tights and dark Rococo-era dresses dart between the trees like insistent fairies. Some carry lace umbrellas (‘Goth Lolita Wear’ occupies a whole floor in a nearby department store). Junior wage-earners, sent to stake a patch for their superiors, set to dreaming in intimately vulnerable postures; their arms and legs flung out to indicate an intention to occupy more space. Paired shoes in a row belong to no one nearby. Nihonshu (saké) turns cheeks ruddy and friends garrulous.

As the sun sets, the mood of enchantment reveals other themes: metamorphosis and attraction. Flash cameras twig at the edge of perception all through the night. The shots later come to colonise social media — sakura, stark and fibrous against the black sky. The flowers are extended electronically, long after they have withered, dropped, and ceased to be.

Gazing into the throats of flowers is surely one of the most trite, and universal, acts of environmental appreciation. From hand-picked posies displayed on a mantelpiece to the questing of the German Romantics for the impossible blue flower — a symbol of inspiration for the 18th-century poet Novalis — flowers induce an apparently effortless contemplation of aesthetic beauty in nature. Yet, for all the stock wonder of cherries crowned in blossom, contemporary Western environmentalism has an uneasy relationship with notions of the beautiful.

Political environmentalism has learnt to take a functional view of nature, turning a blind eye to cultural values such as beauty and to aesthetic practices such as hanami. In striving to establish an impartial, globally consistent means of gauging nature’s value, local forms of environmental imagination have been relegated to the work of poets. Nature is viewed as systemic and quantifiable, neither mysterious not resplendent. In an overburdened world, this is how we have come to debate the comparative significance of habitats and organisms: as ecosystem services.

Perhaps, for environmental thought to be accepted in the political mainstream, it was always necessary to discard the drippy spiritualism of a former age and embrace the numbers game. Yet, something important has been lost in the exchange. Sidelining the environmental imagination — particularly its manifold local variations in different cultures — has narrowed the green movement. Better science, accountancy and leadership might well be essential to confronting the realities of our current environmental crises, but without developing a way to talk about the unreal aspects of our environmental relationships and our imagined attachments to natural phenomena, progress will only ever be tenuous. Ancient as it is, the Japanese tradition of sakura offers germane insight into this very contemporary problem.

by Rebecca Giggs, Aeon |  Read more:

Photo by Jérémie Souteyrat

The Faraway Nearby

Many stories are told about the T’ang dynasty artist Wu Daozi, sometimes named as one of the three great sages of China: that he ignored color and only painted in black ink, that he transgressively painted his own face on an image of the Buddha, that he painted a perfect halo in a single stroke without the aid of compasses, that he painted pictures of the dragons who cause rain so well that the paintings themselves exuded water, that the Emperor sent him to sketch a beautiful region and reprimanded him for coming back emptyhanded, after which he painted a 100-foot scroll that replicated all his travels in one continuous flow, that he made all his paintings boldly and without hesitation, painting like a whirlwind, so that people loved to watch the world emerge from under his brush.

One story about him I read long ago I always remembered. While he was showing the Emperor the landscape he had painted on a wall of the Imperial Palace, he pointed out a grotto or cave, stepped into it, and vanished. Some say that the painting disappeared too. In the account I thought I remembered, he was a prisoner of the Emperor who escaped through his painting. When I was much younger I saw another version of this feat that impressed me equally.

In an episode of the Sunday morning cartoon Roadrunner and Coyote, the eternally hopeful predator makes a trap for the bird. At the point where a road ends in a precipice, he places a canvas on which he paints an extension of the road, complete with the red cliff on one side and the guard rail on the other. The roadrunner neither smashed into the painting nor fell through it, but ran into it and vanished around the painted bend. When the coyote attempted to follow him, he broke through the painting, plummeted, was smashed up, and then, yet again, as always, he was resurrected. Your door is my wall; your wall is my door.

The one creature embodied grace, the other foolish desire, as though they were two elemental principles that could never mingle, in body or spirit. Chuck Jones’s Wile E. Coyote is a version of the great creator deity of the North American continent, Coyote. This is the god whose eyes and cock sometimes detach to seek their own satisfactions, who is often broken, occasionally killed, always resurrected, and never annihilated, who represents the comic principle of survival. But only as I write do I also notice the bird is a Taoist master, like the calm masters nothing could touch in the stories of old China. They walked through fire, through rock, and on air with aplomb.

These feats of the bird and the painter are paradoxical and impossible, but only literally, or only in some media. People disappear into their stories all the time. We live in stories and images, as immersed in them as though they were Wu Daozi’s inkpots; we breathe in presuppositions and exhale further stories. We in the west have been muddled by Plato’s assertion that art is imitation and illusion; we believe that it is a realm apart, one whose impact on our world is limited, one in which we do not live.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me, my mother liked to recite, though words hurt her all the time, and behind the words the stories about how things should be and where she fell short, told by my father, by society, by the church, by the happy flawless women of advertisements. We all live in that world of images and stories, and most of us are damaged by some version of it, and if we’re lucky find others or make better ones that embrace and bless us. (...)

Like many others who turned into writers, I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods. What surprised and still surprises me is that there was another side to the forest of stories and the solitude, that I came out that other side and met people there. Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

by Rebecca Solnit, Guernica |  Read more:

Image: Blue Eggs Box, The Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology. © Sharon Beals, 2008

Adam Minorczyk, Dark Thirty
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Hans Mauli, 24femme, Undate. From Hans Mauli / femmes series
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Who Owns This Land? In Greece, Who Knows?

Not long ago Leonidas Hamodrakas, a lawyer in Athens, decided to pay closer attention to his family’s land holdings — some fields, a scattering of buildings and a massive stone tower — in Mani, a rural region in southern Greece.

But property ownership in Greece is often less than clear cut. So Mr. Hamodrakas put a padlock on his gate and waited to see what would happen. Soon enough, he heard from neighbors. Three of them claimed that they, too, had title to parts of the property.

In this age of satellite imagery, digital records and the instantaneous exchange of information, most of Greece’s land transaction records are still handwritten in ledgers, logged in by last names. No lot numbers. No clarity on boundaries or zoning. No obvious way to tell whether two people, or 10, have registered ownership of the same property.

As Greece tries to claw its way out of an economic crisis of historic proportions, one that has left 60 percent of young people without jobs, many experts cite the lack of a proper land registry as one of the biggest impediments to progress. It scares off foreign investors; makes it hard for the state to privatize its assets, as it has promised to do in exchange for bailout money; and makes it virtually impossible to collect property taxes.

Greece has resorted to tagging tax dues on to electricity bills as a way to flush out owners. Of course, that means that empty property and farmland has yet to be taxed.

Mr. Hamodrakas is far from resolving the dispute with his neighbors. The courts in Greece are flooded with such cases. “These things take years,” he said, “maybe a decade to settle.”

This state of affairs is particularly galling because Greece has thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem over the past two decades, but has little to show for it. At one point, in the early 1990s, Greece took more than $100 million from the European Union to build a registry. But after seeing what was accomplished, the European Union demanded its money back.

Since then, Greece has tried, and tried again. But still, less than 7 percent of the country has been properly mapped, officials say. Experts say that even the Balkan states, recovering from years of Communism and civil war, are far ahead of Greece when it comes to land registries attached to zoning maps — an approach developed by the Romans and in wide use in much of the developed world since the 1800s.

But not in Greece. Here the extent of disputed land is enormous, experts say.

“If you calculated the total deeds that are registered,” said Dimitris Kaloudiotis, an engineer who took over as president of the national land registry authority last month, “the country would be twice as big as it is.” (...)

Land disputes are less acute in urban centers, where sidewalks, streets and building walls help clarify boundaries. But in the countryside, deeds reflect another era. Boundaries can be the “three olive trees near the well” or the spot “where you can hear a donkey on the path.”

“You had guys who had never been to school — who had 100 sheep — and they would throw a rock a certain distance and say: O.K., that’s mine,” said Mr. Hamodrakas, who in addition to his own problems has handled many landownership cases for clients. “The documents might say ‘from the tree to the stream.’ It is very hard to know what they are talking about.”

by Suzanne Daley, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Angelos Tzortzinis for The New York Times

Rio Ancho

Murillo Da Rós - guitar, Convidado Gilson Peranzzetta - piano, Glauco Solter - bass, Luciano Madalozzo - percussion, performing Rio Ancho by Paco de Lucia.

Power Plant (by FMJ Shooter)
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Tsundoku

[ed. There's a word for it...]
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Ralph Steadman, Portrait of Sigmund Freud
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Book Cover Art

[ed. From the Book Cover Archive.]

Albert Camus and the Ventriloquists

“Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.” Those lines are perhaps the most-quoted of Albert Camus’ online. They’ve most likely reached more people than his books have. The problem, aside from the diabolical triteness of the sentiment, is that Camus doesn’t seem to have written these words. They appear in none of his major works nor in any interview that I can find. To anyone who has read Camus’ work, this comes as little surprise. It just doesn’t seem his style to write something so simpering, a message with all the profundity of an episode of The Littlest Hobo, a kind of self-help post-Oprah unspeak drivel, the proliferation of which has made Facebook a place which the sound of mind should avoid as they would a leper colony.

Camus did have a talent for writing one-liners and epigrams though rarely as light-weight as the aforementioned one (which seems more akin to Footprints in the Sand god-bothering doggerel than any literary text). There was more than just his looks linking him to Philip Marlowe-era Bogart. His economy of setting and language, the continual question of complicity, the omnipresent threat of violence, the deadly inexorable clockwork of his plots, the unreliable narrator of The Fall and the narrative tension in The Stranger, The Plague and ‘The Guest’ (from Exile and the Kingdom) mark him out almost as much a noir writer as an Existentialist, the latter a title he always denied. Camus was manifestly hard-boiled; hair slicked, collar up against the wind, cigarette hanging from his mouth. Perhaps he did write those words but they were mistranslated. Perhaps his instructions not to walk ahead or behind was not some happy-clappy sentiment but an untrusting and untrustworthy narrator, afraid his follower might suddenly brandish a revolver or afraid he might do the same. Walk alongside me so I can look you in the eye and get the measure of you, friend. Robbed of Camus’ characteristic style or perhaps the context of a private letter (in which case it would have a touching personal resonance), the quote is just another platitude masquerading as wisdom (hence the vaguely religious connotations). Why it attached itself to Camus or who actually wrote it is unclear.

Let’s take what Camus really did write as an example of the depth of his writing. The words of the infernal barfly Clamence in The Fall, “I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.” The startling admission that opens The Stranger, “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” His evocation of Manhattan from his American Journal, “Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.” In Return to Tipasa, he wrote exquisitely that “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” In Summer in Algiers he is equally life-affirming, “If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”

All very inspiring but only truly so when placed in context. To fully appreciate Camus’ humanism you must set it in the sense of godless post-Nietzsche post-Holocaust futility which he, and the Existentialists, wrestled with and following the very real and often grim experiences of his poverty-stricken childhood in Algeria and his time risking his life in the French Resistance during the Occupation. This is why he deliberately sets his observations within tales of murder, epidemics, betrayals, dictatorships and torture.It might be reassuring to think that at least quotes serve as a signpost towards a writer’s work. (...)

It takes a discerning eye to know who to signpost to and how (the early albums of the Manic Street Preachers with their attendant literary slogans being a successful example of this). Such an eye is rare and brings us to the question of ulterior motives. I’m highly sceptical of those who claim that society is dumbing down, with its implication that some golden age of knowledge existed in the past, often unsurprisingly a draconian age where knowledge was the preserve of a cosseted and craven elite. Though I’m sceptical too of a view of human progress as ever-upward, we do know, in every field of inquiry, immeasurably more now than we ever have before. It may sound unromantic but the famed Library of Alexandria, regardless of its undoubted lost treasures, would pale in comparison to Wikipedia let alone the Library of Congress or the British Library. We have more ways to access this information and share it despite the considerable efforts of those who would happily shut these routes down for most people. The real issue of concern is not whether technology and social networking are rendering us ‘stupider’ (the contrary may well be true or equally the effect may be negligible as technology tends to only bring out and accentuate what is already in us) but the motives behind those who employ them.

Take the prevalence of websites where for your convenience you’re served culture as you might be served chicken nuggets in a drive-thru. You know who they are. In the absence of imagination or depth and using the modern model, you could easily fire together a Top Ten Books/Films/TV Shows About Vampires/Zombies/Fashion/Love, preferably with each book on a separate page or their beloved “after the jump” to greatly boost the hits and thus advertising revenue of your site. You could make sure each book is dealt with in a cursory paragraph, perhaps lifted wholesale from its blurb or press release with a droll rejoinder tacked to the end. Or better still, just stick a quote or ten on there with images taken from other list-based culture sites who’ve in turn taken their image from other sites and so on forever and ever. Include endless ‘how to write’ articles written by writers so it has that familiar creative writing workshop feel. Don’t bother looking too closely or at too much length at anything. Feel free to share all of this via the widgets provided. Reiterate positivity, motivation, self-belief like Dr Phil if his moustache happened to be an acceptably ironic one. Remember above all, your priority is clicks not culture. There’s little harm in any of this of course but there’s little substance to it either. It’s resulted in the elevation of the curator above the creator, taste above talent, pointing above doing.

Culture filtered through social networking (or more accurately the opposite) reaches its nadir with the tendency towards ventriloquism, the point at which it becomes damaging rather than just mildly irritating. Readers inevitably project their own views onto the writers they love (and loathe), it takes a curator or a critic to truly misrepresent a writer. In the past few months, I’ve seen writers whose work I adore be resurrected in horrifying forms. Gone are the edges, complexities and ambiguities that made them so interesting and unique. Instead we get a partially-pristine partially-malformed ventriloquist dummy replica. Worse still they all speak with the same voice. The words are theirs but the voices are not. Those have been changed in the editing process.

by Darran Anderson, Literary Flotsam and Jetsam |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

photo: markk

Cabbage Butterflies (Fiction)

The guy looked disappointed when he saw me. My one sales point is that I’m young, but my eyelids are so puffy they look like caterpillars, and my lips are pale and kind of caterpillary too, and so are my fingers and toes, so I’m pretty much caterpillars all over, and the problem was that the guy was fairly young himself. Not as young as me – I’m only 20 – but late twenties at most, which is about the same or a little older than my friend’s brother, who drives a Soarer and got arrested for possession of crank and who I had sex with a couple of times, but it was on bare tatami mats and the mats made a creepy-looking imprint on my ass.

'Good evening, I’m from the Snake Pit,’ I said, and the guy laughed and said, ‘“Snake Pit” – sounds like a gym for pro wrestlers.’ He had a very gentlemanly-sounding sort of laugh, which put me at ease in a way, but then again it’s always the ‘sophisticated’ ones who want you to stick your tongue in their ass or smooth out the wrinkles in their ball sack and lick it, stuff like that, which I hate, so I acted very shy when I walked in, like it was my first time to do this, but I couldn’t tell if the guy bought it or not. It seemed like he was experienced at this kind of thing, though, and it was one of the best hotels in the city, and the room had this giant bed, and I was thinking, Where does a young fucker like you get off, staying in such an expensive place?

While I was calling my office to tell them I’d arrived at the appointment, the guy took a bottle of wine from this ice bucket that looked like a robot’s head and popped the cork and poured himself a glass, and he seemed right at home, like he did this sort of stuff all the time. I had some wine too, and I was thinking it wasn’t as good as the gin and tonic LUI and me always drink together, but I stopped thinking about LUI when the guy said, ‘Show me your ass.’ I asked if I could take a shower first, and he said, ‘No need. I’ll hardly even touch your body. Just lift up your skirt and stick out your ass.’ I kind of stalled and kept fidgeting, and finally he said, ‘Never mind,’ and pulled a ten thousand yen bill from his wallet and held it out to me and said, ‘Take this and leave.’ I realise now that I should have just taken it and left, but at the time I thought he must be incredibly rich and maybe I could get a lot more money out of him, so I went ahead and showed him my ass. He poked at a cyst on my ass cheek with the tip of a ballpoint pen and said, ‘What the hell is this? It’s disgusting!’ I said it was a cyst, and he said, ‘You must be undernourished. That’s what happens when you eat nothing but noodles, like the Filipinas do – they’re all covered with cysts and boils.’ I knew some Filipinas from the last place I’d worked, and it made me so mad that he’d say that, it brought tears to my eyes.

‘You crying?’ He slapped my ass. ‘What are you, a moron?’ he said, and grabbed hold of my ass cheek and started touching my pussy with his other hand. He was so good with his fingers that even as I stood there crying, I started to get wet, and all I could think was, Shit, I really am a moron. Then he let go of me and said, ‘Cover your ass back up, it looks like hell,’ and took twenty thousand yen from his wallet and told me to leave again.

‘Please,’ I said, ‘I’ll do anything you ask.’

I don’t know why I said that. I think it must have been because my grandfather used to bawl me out about giving up on things. He used to tell me it’s important never to quit, that you need to finish things you’ve started, and I’ve always remembered that. But why would I think of my grandfather, who I loved so much, at a time like this? It made me sad, and I started crying again.

As I cried I knelt on the floor and tried to undo the zipper on the guy’s velveteen pants so I could blow him, but he grabbed my hand and told me to stop. LUI always forgives me if I give him a good long blow job, but I guess this guy was a different type. ‘Look, I’m offering to pay you,’ he said, ‘so just go,’ but I said, ‘They’ll yell at me at the office if I go back early.’ He stared at me for a minute, and then he said, ‘Ah, what the hell,’ and asked me if I was hungry. I nodded, and he took me down to a bar on the basement floor.

The bar was all gold and black, and the shelves were lined with bottles of liquor I’d never even seen before, and the waiters were tall, and it made you feel special to be in there. The guy ordered a steak sandwich and put it in front of me and said to the bartender, ‘This one’s got a cyst on her ass,’ and the bartender, who was mixing up a drink in a shaker, got a big laugh out of that. I was kind of shocked, but I figured maybe that sort of talk was normal in fancy bars like this, and I just quietly ate the steak sandwich. It was really delicious. I told the guy this, but he didn’t even look at me but kept talking to the bartender, saying stuff like, ‘Remember that Vietnamese girl? Half Chinese, half French. If she wasn’t strung out on smack I’d consider making her my main squeeze,’ and the bartender kept working the shaker and said a girl named Natsuki, from a bar in Ginza called Madonna or La Donna or something, had shown up and asked a waiter for the guy’s room number, but the waiter wouldn’t tell her, so she sat drinking whiskey and went through half a bottle before she got up and left. When the guy asked if she’d been wearing a kimono, the bartender nodded, and the guy said, ‘Phew, I really dodged a bullet there,’ and took a slice of pickle from my plate and stuck it in his mouth but didn’t chew it, only let it hang out over his lower lip, and said, ‘But that woman’s a genius at giving head. Let her have her way, she’ll suck on it all night long. You’ll wake up in the morning and find her slurping away,’ and this time both he and the bartender laughed.

It wasn’t until I was finishing my steak sandwich that I realised that I’d missed the last train, and then I remembered my grandfather again. My grandfather always said you should never let down your guard, not when you’re taking a dump, not when you’re sick – never – and here I was mooning over the brown juice oozing out from between the slices of bread and forgetting all about the time. To be honest, though, maybe the sandwich wasn’t the only reason. I’ve missed the last train before, and when I asked the customer I was with if I could spend the night, they were always happy to let me. I didn’t think this guy would let me but went ahead and asked him, and he said he was going to have a woman over. I asked if I could sleep in his room anyway, and he thought for a minute and said, ‘Well, that might be interesting. All right, stay and watch.’

by Ryu Murakami, Cabbage Butterflies | Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Hummers

I have hummingbirds at my feeder (an hour after setup). They're so cool. Food recipe: 4 parts water to one part sugar.

by markk

Tim Phillips, coconut palms australia
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Jerry Brown's Political Reboot

One Friday morning this spring, I drove to Washington’s Dulles airport at dawn, to catch the first nonstop flight to San Francisco. When I got off the plane six hours later, the morning sun still slanting through the terminal windows, my cellphone began ringing practically as soon as I turned it on.

“Okay, you’re here!” the man on the other end of the call said, cheerily. I’d been trying to arrange a visit to his office for quite a while, and just the previous evening he’d let me know that if I got there in a hurry, he’d have time to talk the next day, as well as over the weekend. As I walked through the airport, he began reeling off turn-by-turn instructions for reaching his office in Oakland in my rental car. “You’ll take the Bay Bridge to the exit for the 580 East and the 24. But don’t go all the way to the 24! That would send you out to Concord. Take the 980 West until the exit for 27th Street, and then …”

It was like a moment from a Saturday Night Live sketch of  "The Californians”—­which seemed appropriate, since the man I was talking with was the Californian, Jerry Brown. Brown began his first two terms as governor in 1974, at age 36, following one Republican former actor, Ronald Reagan. He returned to the office at age 72, following another, Arnold Schwarzenegger. In between he ran for president three times and the U.S. Senate once, all of course unsuccessfully; served eight years as Oakland’s mayor and four as California’s attorney general; and lived in both Japan (studying Zen meditation) and India (volunteering for Mother Teresa). He celebrated his 75th birthday the weekend I was in Oakland, which means that if he runs for reelection next year and if he wins, both of which are considered likely—his approval rating this year has been the envy of other politicians in the state—he could still be governor at age 80. “This is certainly a new identity for Brown, so flighty in his first ‘Governor Moonbeam’ period as governor,” Bruce Cain, a political scientist and an expert on California politics at Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West, told me. “Now he is the most trusted, stable, and reliable leader around.” I asked Kevin Starr, of the University of Southern California and the author of the acclaimed Americans and the California Dream series of books, how Brown was seen in his return to office. “He is now liked,” Starr said. “Eccentric, but liked.”

Life and health are provisional, and within the past two years, Brown has undergone radiation treatment for early-stage prostate cancer (while maintaining his normal work schedule) and had a cancerous growth removed from his nose. But he moves, talks, reacts, and laughs like someone who is in no mood, and feels no need, to slow down. He is nearly a decade older than Bill Clinton but comes across as younger and bouncier.

“I love what I am doing,” he told me once I got to his Oakland office. “I love it much more than the first time. Back then I got bored because we didn’t have big problems. Now I am very enthusiastic. Everything’s interesting, and it’s complicated. There is a zest!” He likes to pound the desk or table as he talks, and this passage was punctuated: love (bang) … love (bang) … zest! (bang bang bang!). Anne Gust Brown, a former Gap executive in her mid‑50s, who became his wife eight years ago and is widely regarded as his most influential and practical-minded adviser, arched an eyebrow from the other side of the room, where she was half-listening while working at a computer. “Ed-mund!” she said smilingly, but being sure to get his attention. (His official name is Edmund Gerald Brown Jr., after his father, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who was governor for eight years before he lost to Ronald Reagan in 1966.) “Don’t get yourself too worked up!” As a note on nomenclature: apart from his wife’s occasional joking use of Edmund and my own antiquated sense that I should address him as Governor, every other person I heard speak about—or with—him called him Jerry.

by James Fallows, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photo: Chris McPherson

Patricia Robert
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The Gift of Siblings

Given what a mouthy thing I grew up to be, it’s shocking to me that I began talking later than most children do. But I didn’t need words. I had my older brother, Mark.

The way my mother always recounted it, I’d squirm, pout, mewl, bawl or indicate my displeasure in some comparably articulate way, and before she could press me on what I wanted and perhaps coax actual language from me, Mark would rush in to solve the riddle.

“His blanket,” he’d say, and he’d be right.

“Another cookie,” he’d say, and he’d be even righter.

From the tenor of my sob or the twitch of one of my fat little fingers, Mark knew which chair I had designs on, which toy I was ogling. He decoded the signs and procured the goods. Only 17 months older, he was my psychic and my spokesman, my shaman and my Sherpa. With Mark around, I was safe.

This weekend he’s turning 50 — it’s horrifying, trust me — and we’ll all be together, as we were at his 40th and my 40th and seemingly every big milestone: he and I and our younger brother, Harry, and our sister, Adelle, the last one to come along. We marched (or, rather, crawled and toddled) into this crazy world together, and though we had no say in that, it’s by our own volition and determination that we march together still. Among my many blessings, this is the one I’d put at the top.

Two weeks ago, the calendar decreed that we Americans pause to celebrate mothers, as it does every year. Three weeks hence, fathers get their due. But as I await the arrival of my brothers, my sister and their spouses in Manhattan, which is where we’ll sing an off-key “Happy Birthday” to Mark and drink too much, my thoughts turn to siblings, who don’t have a special day but arguably have an even more special meaning to, and influence on, those of us privileged to have them.

“Siblings are the only relatives, and perhaps the only people you’ll ever know, who are with you through the entire arc of your life,” the writer Jeffrey Kluger observed to Salon in 2011, the year his book “The Sibling Effect” was published. “Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form.”

Of course the “entire arc” part of Kluger’s comments assumes that untimely death doesn’t enter the picture, and that acrimony, geography or mundane laziness doesn’t pull brothers and sisters apart, to a point where they’re no longer primary witnesses to one another’s lives, no longer fellow passengers, just onetime housemates with common heritages.

That happens all too easily, and whenever I ponder why it didn’t happen with Mark, Harry, Adelle and me — each of us so different from the others — I’m convinced that family closeness isn’t a happy accident, a fortuitously smooth blend of personalities.

by Frank Bruni, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Futurity

Edwyn Collins