Quoting from the Poetry Foundations’s website:

The editors of Poetry magazine selected the winning manuscripts from more than 1,000 submissions. In announcing the winners, Poetry senior editor Don Share said, “Each year the competition grows larger—and stronger. We’re extremely pleased that the 2011 Ruth Lilly Fellowships will recognize this diverse and talented group of younger poets.” Editor Christian Wiman added, “The subjects and aesthetics of these writers are as various as their backgrounds, but there are two qualities they all share: excellence and promise. You’ll be hearing a lot from these writers in the years to come.”

Zac…I am awed by your erudition, dedication to art, and discipline.

Congratulations.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Less than a mile from the Pacific, unmanned and open to all, the Sea Ranch Chapel appears to be protected by its own beauty, for vandals neither spray-can nor gouge it. A non-denominational sanctuary for prayer, meditation, and spiritual renewal, it is an architectural wave on a sea of grass just off California’s Route 1, 110 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge and a few miles south of tiny Gualala (“wa-LA-la”), Mendocino County‘s southernmost city.

A gift from locals Robert and Betty Buffum, the chapel was designed by San Diego artist and architect James T. Hubbell and built in 1985.

Among the many beauties of the California coast, the Sea Ranch Chapel is unique.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

America, in skin and shorts, sleeps

on Wall Street’s back

the beast

appetite and direction, ignores

flies

It is five a.m. and raining

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Cell phone photo: Anonymous, July 2009. Look closely. A man lies supine upon the statue.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

What an image!

The NASA space shuttle Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope, seen in silhouette during a solar transit at 12:17 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, May 13, 2009, from west of Vero Beach, Florida. The two space craft were at an altitude of 600 km above the earth. It took only 0.8 seconds for them to cross the solar disc.

Photo Credit: Thierry Legault

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Max Weber

In 1905, physics was a rapidly expanding field. Scientific—include here the new “science” of economics—progress was accelerating, and science was expected to provide physical/mathematical/logical explanations to all previously unsolved or unsolvable conundrums…including the stock market.

Roger W. Babson

“Babson was not a man who inspired confidence as a prophet…. As an educator, philosopher, theologian, statistician, forecaster and friend of the law of gravity [Blogger's note: in 1948, Babson founded and financed the Gravity Research Foundation which encouraged research into anti-gravity physics], he has sometimes been thought to have spread himself too thin. The methods by which he reached his conclusions were a problem. They involved a hocus pocus of lines and areas on a chart. Intuition and even mysticism played a part. Those who employed rational, objective and scientific methods failed to foretell the crash. In these matters, as so often in our culture, it is far, far better to be wrong in a respectable way than to be right for the wrong reasons.”

A generous philanthropist, Babson founded three business colleges: Babson College in Babson Park, MA (1919),  Webber College, now Webber International University, in Babson Park, FL (1927), and the now-defunct Utopia College, in Eureka, KS (1946).

Eccentric and somewhat poetic, Babson wrote in his autobiography, Actions and Reactions (1935):

“Another thing I have been doing, which I hope will be carried on after my death, is the carving of mottoes on the boulders at Dogtown, Gloucester, Massachusetts. My family says that I am defacing the boulders and disgracing the family with these inscriptions, but the work gives me a lot of satisfaction, fresh air, exercise and sunshine. I am really trying to write a simple book with words carved in stone instead of printed paper. Besides, when on Dogtown common, I revert to a boyhood which I once enjoyed when driving cows there many years ago.”

For more on this unusual man, see this review of his autobiography.

Last month I walked among Babson’s boulders (images of all 24 here). Viewed from within this new economic crisis, Babson’s worthy, Protestant ethic inscriptions seem quaint and entirely out of touch with modern Wall Street sensibilities.

Be Clean       Be on Time       Be True       Courage       Get a Job    Help Mother
Ideals       Ideas       If Work Stops Values Decay       Industry       Initiative
Integrity       Intelligence       Keep Out of Debt       Kindness       Loyalty
Never Try/Never Win       Prosperity Follows Service       Save
Spiritual Power        Study       Truth       Use Your Head       Work

What would today’s Wall Streeters inscribe on their boulders?

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[If you are in Gloucester and want to see the Babson Boulders, contact Walk the Words for a personal tour. Photos of me and the boulders courtesy of Seania McCarthy/Walk the Words.]

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Lanny writes:

“A young, black, athletic man will soon be our president.” Why don’t you call him white? He’s just as much white as black. Is my wife, Karina, yellow or white, Japanese or American? Her mother is 100% Japanese, and her father from Georgia is white with a touch of Native American.

Lanny has an excellent point, and one that I have often shouted at the screen when cable news pundolts do as I did.

Mea culpa.  I reflexively adopted the bigoted and long-established Jim Crow “one-drop rule” which states that to be white is to be pure; even one drop of Negro blood makes one black.

But Langston Hughes wrote, “I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word ‘Negro’ is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure. It means all Negro, therefore black. I am brown.”

In Richard Rodriguez’s excellent video essay on multiracial identity broadcast December 11 on PBS, he notes:

click to enlarge image

On the mainland at his post-election press conference, Barack Obama, the son of white Kansas and black Kenya, used a colloquial canine analogy to describe himself, “A lot of shelter dogs are mutts, like me.”

We Americans have never had a graceful vocabulary to describe our racial mixture. In generations past, when white or black married an American Indian, their children became “half-breeds,” as though less than whole.

Television and print journalists…relied on the old black-white vocabulary. The media proclaimed Barack Obama “America’s first black president,” their formulation suggesting that Jim Crow still trailed the nation, even at the moment when racism’s curse seemed to be broken.

Rodriguez includes this striking photograph in his video essay. It is part of Kip Fulbeck’s exhibition entitled “The Hapa Project,” now at Santa Clara University’s Saisset Museum. The multiracial subject writes: “What am I? I am exactly the same as every other person in 2500.”

May it be so.

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From Wikipedia:

Used without qualification, hapa is often taken to mean “part white”, and is shorthand for hapa haole. The term can be used in conjunction with other Hawaiian racial and ethnic descriptors to specify a particular racial or ethnic mixture.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

But there is still much to see. The Arms and Armor Room is magnificent.  Its many artifacts illustrate the armorer’s craftsmanship, art, and weapons development, as well as the pomp and ego of those who wore and/or showed off the hundreds of pieces.

I spent more than an hour in this single room, marveling at how each advance in weapons technology led to a concomitant upgrade in armor (note how the knight and his horse are almost fully sheathed in metal) until the introduction of firearms canceled out the armored warrior’s advantage.

Our Pentagon is a direct descendant of this “march of progress.”

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Also born on this day in 1944 was Odd Nerdrum, a prominent Norwegian painter.

Our names were switched at birth.

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“Wanderers at the Beach” 2001

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

It is an engaging video, and comments on other websites from eyewitnesses (most often reporting their visits to Thailand) to such “artwork creation” give good evidence that this is not a fraud. The elephant is actually holding the brush to the paper and moving it with precision.

A more important question is whether the elephant is recreating an image from its memory or is simply repeating a series of brush strokes that it has learned through training. If the former, it is fair to call this painting art—and a clear example of creativity and a self-reflective consciousness. If the latter, it is a circus trick—but a good one!

In The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote, “The mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind, although immensely in degree.” On the surface, Darwin’s statement seems to include a belief in gradients, a gradual and continuous phylogenic climb. This would imply that species only slightly lower than humans on the evolutionary ladder ought to have at least a rudimentary creativity, and if properly equipped (we have opposable thumbs, remember), could demonstrate it. It may be true. Some primates, using signs because of vocalizing limitations, have been able to show significant language skills. This is frightening to some. The existence of self-reflective consciousness in animals is anti-Cartesian (Descartes thought only humans had souls and, therefore, consciousness), and anti-Creationist.

But what seems continuous may actually be a series of discontinuous steps, consciousness-creating quanta, each occasioned by genetic mutations, which by their GATC substitutions are inherently incremental and discrete. The creative, self-reflective consciousness that streams through human culture may not be unique because we are special. Humans may have become special because we are discontinuously unique.

In The Missing Link in Cognition, a collection of essays edited by Herbert Terrace and Janet Metcalfe, self-reflective consciousness is defined as “the ability to doubt what one knows, to deny or affirm one’s beliefs, to judge one’s own memories and percepts, to comment on one’s dreams, to recollect and reflect upon one’s own past…” There are many studies of self-reflective consciousness in animals: elephants seem to have some understanding of death; they often attend the bones of relatives. Chimps appear to grieve when family members die. Dolphins recognize mirror reflections as images of themselves.

Some chimps paint abstractly, but what about this wondrous pachyderm, capable of representational art that is nearly as recognizable as the cave paintings at Lascaux? Is she aesthetically aware as she paints the elephant holding a flower? Researchers Gisela Kaplan and Lesley J. Rogers, noting that sales of elephant-painted canvases are being used to raise money for zoos and conservation ask:

“Is this really art, or are the paintings more or less accidentally pleasing to us but not to the animal itself?… The first step in deciding whether an animal might have produced a painting as art is to find out exactly what that animal can see. If an animal seems to use color aesthetically but either lacks color vision entirely or is able to perceive only some colors, we would have to conclude that any aesthetic use of color is accidental, however pleasing it may appear to us.”

© Cornell University Computer Graphics Program

It is not clear in this video what role the handler is playing. Certainly he is choosing the colors and handing the elephant the brush. The real story, I suspect, is that like a dog trained to climb steps, jump through hoops, and do back flips in a set sequence, this elephant creates his “art” after intensive training in copying a painting originally done by a human—many trials repeated and repeated with rewards and punishments until the animal has mastered the trick. As proof of this faithful, rote memory, there is another video online of the same elephant painting a nearly identical picture. As Horton says, “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful one hundred percent.” Or, perhaps there is something to the old saw, “An elephant never forgets.”

Finally, and sadly, young elephants in Thailand are separated from their mothers and subjected to a brutal domesticating training regime called phaajaan (“breaking the love between”). Click the link if you have stomach or curiosity. Phaajaan is, they claim, necessary to “break” the animal…or to make it paint.

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Three days after I posted this, CNN picked up the story, but their piece was simply a couple of minutes of “gee-whiz.” No research. No attempt to figure out what is actually happening.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.