Wallace Stevens Contemplating

from Wallace Steven's journal, Sunday, August 10, 1902 [New York]
Letters of Wallace Stevens: Selected and Edited by Holly Stevens

In the early part of the day I saw some very respectable country which, as usual, set me contemplating. I love to walk along with a slight wind playing in the trees about me and think over a thousand and one odds and ends. Last night I spent an hour in the dark transept of St. Patrick's Cathedral where I go now and then in my more lonely moods. An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses. What incessant murmurs fill that ever-laboring, tireless church! But to-day in my walk I thought that after all there is no conflict of forces but rather a contrast. In the cathedral I felt one presence; on the highway I felt another. Two different deities presented themselves; and, though I have only cloudy visions of either, yet I now feel the distinction between them. The priest in me worshipped one God at one shrine; the poet another God at another shire. The priest worshiped Mercy and Love; the poet, Beauty and Might. In the shadows of the church I could hear the prayers of men and women; in the shadows of the trees nothing human mingled with Divinity. As I sat dreaming with the Congregation I felt how the glittering altar worked on my senses stimulating and consoling them; and as I went tramping through the fields and woods I beheld every leaf and blade of grass revealing or rather betokening the Invisible. (pp. 58-9)

Google Notebooks

I have gotten very interested in many of the tools Google offers to users for free. For one thing, they often include mobile versions for wireless phones and other mobile devices. I recently purchased a Palm Treo 755p smart phone, which has one of the best miniature querty keyboards I have seen and features a convenient user interface. It’s great for accessing web pages, believe it or not, especially ones that offer a mobile style sheet.

Google’s Notebook tool is a terrific way to make quick notes on anything you want to keep track of. Notes can be organized into individual notebooks you create, and within notebooks into individual sections. Convenient search options are also provided. The user interface is intuitive and easy to learn. What’s more, the tool includes a nifty clip feature enabling you to clip items of interest from web pages and insert them automatically into notebooks.

The mobile version is limited to viewing notebooks and adding notes (you can’t create notebooks in the mobile view, for instance.) But just being able to add notes from your phone is a terrific feature. At least, it is if you always carry your phone. It’s easy to use while reading, no matter where you happen to be.

I’ve been trying to figure out a convenient way to search my notes from the phone (the mobile version of notebook doesn’t include the search features either). I finally realized if I published a notebook (another feature of the tool) and made it available as a web page, I could view the page on my phone’s browser and use the browser’s search text feature to locate notes. I decided to add a few of the notebooks I have published as links on my blog just for fun. My notes aren’t great reading, by any means, but they do provide an audit trail for my eclectic rambling through topics that interest me.

If you happen to be an inverterate note-taker, you owe it to yourself to check out Google’s cool (and free!) notebook tool.

Lincoln’s Sparrow

Elly and I added a bird to our life list this evening, a Lincoln’s Sparrow, bringing the total to 90 (a pitiful number in the eyes of seasoned birders I’m afraid, but there it is). We noticed the elegant little visitor foraging for seeds on our gravel walkway, and I managed to get some pictures of him. Her? It was just a bit smaller than several dark-eyed juncos who were also frequenting the area.

Seeing a new bird is fun, especially so when we find it in our own backyard. We have had a run of luck in the last few weeks, seeing Great-Tailed grackles for the first time. Then seeing a ruby-crowned kinglet, which we have observed before but not in our own yard. And then this fine bird. The Lincoln’s sparrow was named by Audubon in honor of Thomas Lincoln, who was a friend of his, as well as being the father of Abraham Lincoln.

The pictures don’t do it justice, actually. Many of the American sparrows are beautiful little birds, far different from the common House sparrows, which aren’t even native to the Americas (European imports), and aren’t actually related to our own sparrows. Nevertheless, they are what most people think of as sparrows. The Lincoln’s sparrow who visited us was a treat, and stayed around for an obligingly long time to have his picture taken and be carefully studied. These sparrows are said to be secretive birds and somewhat rare migrants in Missouri.

The Pursuit of Happiness

The most widely reported conclusion, from surveys done by psychologist Ed Diener, is that within any given country, at the lowest end of the income scale money does buy happiness: People who worry every day about paying for food and shelter report significantly less well-being than those who don’t. But once you are freed from basic needs and have entered the middle class, the relationship between wealth and happiness becomes smaller. The rich are happier on average than the middle class, but only by a little, and part of this relationship is reverse correlation: Happy people grow rich faster because, as in the marriage market, they are more appealing to others (such as bosses), and also because their frequent positive emotions help them to commit to projects, to work hard, and to invest in their futures. Wealth itself has only a small direct effect on happiness because it so effectively speeds up the hedonic treadmill. For example, as the level of wealth has doubled or tripled in the last fifty years in many industrialized nations, the levels of happiness and satisfaction with life that people report have not changed, and depression has actually become more common. Vast increases in gross domestic product let to improvements in the comforts of life — a larger home, more cars, televisions, and restaurant meals, better health and longer life — but these improvements became the normal conditions of life; all were adapted to and taken for granted, so they did not make people feel any happier or more satisfied.

— Jonathan Haidt
The Happiness Hypothesis, pp. 88-89

Great-Tailed Grackle

I needed something to cheer me up today and found this huge fellow stomping around our feeding station this afternoon. Of course, it could be a female...



Anyway, it is a Great-tailed Grackle. We saw one of these for the first time a few weeks ago. Elly spotted it and commented that it was the largest grackle she had ever seen. Actually, she said it looks like a cross between a grackle and a crow. I didn’t get any pictures on that occasion. Here is one I took today with a common grackle in the same frame to show the size comparision.



The Great-Tailed grackles are really big. Diana Sudyka has a wonderful watercolor of one on her Tiny Avery blog. She and her husband Jay (both artists) were in Austin for a poster event a few weeks back, and I guess these were thick on the ground down there.

We had another birding first (for our backyard) yesterday: a ruby-crowned kinglet. I’ve actually seen these in wooded areas near our neighborhood, but never in our backyard before. Elly and I both got a good look at the little fellow: about the size of a Great-tailed grackle’s head! I actually saw the bird’s ruby crown, which I haven’t seen before.

I tried to get a picture of it flying up into the air because they fan their tails in flight, which is really impressive, but that didn’t work out. Here is one more snap of the Great-tailed. I can’t help thinking of these as the velociraptor of the grackle world.

Sailing with Captain Blood

Eloise by the Book Piles introduced me to Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood with a post on her blog. It was her first book of 2008, and her account of reading it was so enticing I bought a copy when my self-imposed book buying moratorium ended at the end of January. Of course, the novel was made into a famed pirate movie starring Errol Flynn, which I haven’t actually seen, but which lack will be remedied shortly.

Peter Blood, an Irish physician whose varied career includes military service in France, is sentenced to a life of slavery and transported to a Barbados plantation after treating a rebel fighting against King James. But the resourceful Blood escapes from captivity after capturing a Spanish privateer with a crew of ex-slaves and becomes the terror of the Spanish main. Before Blood leaves the island he falls in love with Arabella Bishop, a beautiful and spirited young woman who has the misfortune to be the niece of one of the tale’s principal villains, an inhuman slave owner who is also in charge of the island’s militia and takes command of a small fleet to pursue the elusive pirate.

Sabatini captivates his reader from the first page of the novel, which, simply put, is unadulterated fun. For me, it brings back summers I spent growing up at my grandparents’ home in the Ozarks, swimming, fishing, learning woodworking with my grandfather in his workshop, and reading adventure stories in the air-conditioned den sequestered from the heat of July and August afternoons. My grandfather loved to read, a trait he passed on to my mother and through her to his grandchildren. He was a great fan of Zane Gray and Louis Lamour. Lamour westerns were a staple of my summer reading, and share much in common with Sabatini’s pirate yarn, despite the different venue. The heroes were resourceful, gallant, and upright, while the heroines were quick-witted and steadfast. Granddad collected a whole set of Zane Gray in an inexpensive Walter J. Black edition. Dozens and dozens of books. When I came across some of these at Half-Price books, I bought a few of his favorite titles as a keepsake. These include The Riders of the Purple Sage, 30,000 on the Hoof, The Hash Knife Outfit, and The Mysterious Rider.

I don’t know if Granddad ever read Captain Blood. At least, I have no recollection of his having the book. If he had, I’m sure he would have loved the story. Here is one of my favorite pictures of my grandfather, looking more than a little piratical with his cockatiel, Mully, perched on his shoulder.


My mother, an Earth science teacher, brought Mully home along with several Zebra finches one day. Dad and Granddad, who lived with us for the last years of his life, made all sorts of fun of Mom for bringing those birds home. But, within a few weeks, Mully’s cage was mysteriously transported into my Granddad’s room, and they were close companions from then on. Granddad taught Mully to speak and often fell asleep in his chair with Mully perched on his shoulder. More than once Mully took advantage of the situation to climb down Granddad’s arm and chew all the buttons of his TV remote control. Granddad would wryly pay my father to fetch him a new one from Sears and Roebuck.

We lost Granddad and Mom within a few years of each other. Dad kept Mully for the rest of his life, and when Dad passed away, the folks at the retirement community asked if they could keep Mully in their menagerie. In addition to teaching him to speak, Granddad also taught him to make wolf whistles at the ladies. Like Granddad, Mully was quite the charmer.

Happiness: Lessons from a New Science

I finished reading Richard Layard’s Happiness: Lessons from a New Science and wanted to post a few comments about it before loaning my copy of the book to a friend who wants to figure out where Layard “went wrong” in his conclusion that progressive income tax improves overall happiness by providing a disincentive for workers to continuously increase their income, which Layard amusingly categorizes as a form of pollution. My friend is a political conservative.

Initially, I checked the book out from the library, but liked it so well I bought my own copy (a nice Penguin trade paperback). I’m not sure what actually brought Layard’s book to my attention: whether I came across a reference to it in another book I was reading, or just came across it while roaming the public library. One project I have embarked on is to keep a closer eye on how books come into my life. I mean in a figurative sense. I’m quite familiar with how they get in the front door, as is my wife Elly, who balances our check book.

Layard, a London economist, notes that over the last 50 years income levels have increased significantly in America and the UK, but happiness has not increased. The fact that happiness can be effectively measured is something he treats early in his book, which includes extensive end notes and a long reading list. The book is a jumping off point for many interesting reading projects, one factor that caused me to add it to our home library. At any rate, after showing how happiness can be effectively measured, and providing examples of studies that have done so, he essentially asks the question "What’s wrong with the income/happiness picture.” If people are making more money, why are’t they happier.

The answers Layard provides, noting that many things contribute to happiness, take a more or less big picture view based in economics, which is not surprising given the author’s background. If this sounds like boring or difficult reading, let me assure you it is not. The text itself is just over 200 pages, pithy, with provocative insights and not a small amount of humor.

So how can more income be a form of pollution?? Layard points out that for much of the world’s population, more income is critical for happiness simply because many people don’t have enough income to provide basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter. After a certain point, however, additional income has an increasingly smaller impact on happiness. In fact, some rather convincing studies have shown that relative income, that is how much one makes in comparison with his or her social group, is more important to happiness than the income level itself. People who earn less money than their friends are less happy, while people who make more money are happier. The catch, however, is making more money increases happiness less than the increase in unhappiness among those who fall behind. Thus, the rat race and Layard’s conclusion about the polluting effect of striving to maximize income.

If the consumers are to consume more, it is they who will have to produce it. If they work harder, they can indeed consume more but only at the sacrifice of something — their family life or their tennis or whatever. So it only makes sense for them to work harder if there is some overall net benefit. But as we have seen, people can have too great a work incentive, because one of their aims is to improve their relative income. Every time they raise their relative income (which they like), they lower the relative income of other people (which those people dislike). This is an “external disbenefit” imposed on others, a form of physical pollution. If people do not take this pollution into account when they decide how much to work...the result will be too much work and a distorted work-life balance.

Taxing Pollution

At least that would be true if there were no taxes. But taxes provide a standard cure for pollution. They make it possible to charge people for the damage which they do to others — and so force them to take this damage into account. People will thus take note of external costs which they would otherwise ignore, and if the level of tax is right, the polluting activity will be cut back to the most efficient level.

...In both situations the tax is not distorting (by discouraging something that is desirable) but corrective (by discouraging something that is undesirable.) This puts a completely new light on our existing taxes, because both economists and politicians have tended to look on taxes as distorting, even at very low levels of tax. But we have now seen that at least up to some point the taxes are performing a useful function that we were unaware of. They are helping to preserve our work-life balance.

This is just one aspect of a multi-faceted and fascinating book. Layard’s analysis of the impact of television on happiness (predictably, it decreases happiness) was another highlight for me.

I’m not sure reading this book will increase the happiness of my conservative friend, but it should at least generate some lively conversation.