Author: Carl Oberg

Piling up — adding more

Hitting the blog again, and I am challenging myself to get this done every day for 30 days. Here we go.

I am starting to up again, but there is just a lot going on. We’ve just wrapped up a financial quarter at work, so reports are due in the next couple of weeks and my team and I are on the clock. Outside of the job, shit has piled up: busted car, researching my podcast concept (more on that later), studying for some credentials I wanted to pick up.

It seems like a lot. So I’m adding more to show that I can. This long, gloomy winter needs a challenge.

Prince said “Sometimes it snows in April.” I’m going to make it blizzard and come out with some successes.

Thoughts on Magazines

It’s my impression that cheap weekly or even monthly news-based magazines are continuing their slow death, but that more expensive, higher quality lifestyle and esoteric titles somehow survive.

I’ve been particularly struck by this article in Monocle *about* Mare Magazine (inception warning!). I love it: a magazine about the sea … or is it around the sea … or is it of the sea. Somehow it has 27,000 subscribers (it’s only in German) and has survived a decade.

It gives me inspiration for a new magazine focused not on ideas (like The Freeman at my beloved FEE) but rather on anything around a central concept. I’ve got a few ideas ….

Magazine survey

What magazines or websites should I read on the regular that are not news focused? I’m looking for weird, different, esoteric, varied, beautiful.

Here’s a short list of magazines and sites I am already aware of so we avoid duplicates:

  • Monocle
  • Gray’s Sporting Journal
  • Afar
  • Sun Magazine
  • Oxford Magazine
  • Cabinet
  • Esopus
  • Put A Egg On It
  • Lucky Peach

Brexit considered

before-thatcher-came-to-power-the-uk-was-literally-covered-in-gigantic-piles-of-garbage

I spent the 90s caring deeply for the European Union. I studied it, I lived in Brussels, I wrote about it, I spoke to its creators. I was lucky enough to have people like Peter Praet, Jamie Shea, and Jerry Sheridan and others as my teachers. So I come to this with opinions and of course with biases, and also with some in-depth education and professional interest. I haven’t always been an accountant or a professional libertarian. I spent the first decade of my working life in International Affairs. (Please enjoy this wikileaks cable with my name in it.)

So Brexit creates mixed emotions for me. Some thoughts in no particular order:

  • I am certainly sympathetic to the notion that pushing power away from the center and farther down to the (or at least closer to the) people is a good thing generally. But a UK disconnected from Brussels does not necessarily make for a freer or more prosperous UK. Please remember what pre-Thatcher, pre-EU Britain was like. That nation has the capacity to go insular and closed very fast. And, of course, it can be the most open, prosperous place on the planet as well. So I think some of my friends celebrations are a bit premature. Garbage in the streets and “Rivers of Blood” Enoch Powell are possible again. Of course, those things are possible with the EU as well, but I think the former communist nations prevent that from happening too fast. More on that later.
  • As my friend Tsvet Tsonevski pointed out this week, one does not simply “leave” the EU. There are dozens of treaties, hundreds of agreements, and probably thousands of regulations which have been incorporated into UK law in one or another over the past decades. How this all is dismantled (will it be?) is subject to potentially years of wrangling. In addition, the UK presumably wants to remain at the very least a trading partner of the EU (see above for that question). So all these rules and regulations will continue to have some level of de facto force in the UK, to the same extent that, say, the US must abide by EU rules to trade with European countries (and vice versa). I would wager that some “Leave” voters don’t realize the degree to which they can’t leave the EU. Ever.
  • An example: CE marking. Hell, I’m subject to CE marking and I don’t live in the EU. Also, CE marking is governed by the EEA. Will the UK leave just the EU or also the EEA? How about EFTA? How about the successor agreements to the WEU? What about this freaking mess in Cornwall? You mean people voted for “freedom” but want free money anyway? Shocking. All this to say that no one really knows what “leaving the EU” means. The (very sketchy and unclear) map is not the territory.
  • I would like people to appreciate the role the EU played in healing wounds post-war in Europe and in successfully bringing the post-Soviet countries out of the that orbit and into the West. Yes, I know we don’t know how things would have played out without the EU. Maybe things would have been just as successful or even more so. But we don’t actually know, and it seems like a lot of people I know who are jumping on the Brexit bandwagon assume the EU was always this regulatory behemoth. But the project in the 50s through the 80s was not that at all. It was a means to creating a larger peaceful market that recognized the political difficulties in such a project, and so slowly but surely integrated the nations of Europe. A valuable and noble project in my estimation. And one that was largely successful when concerned primarily with trade.
  • My old boss Dan Griswold makes some good arguments about possible future UK regret connected to trade dynamics. It’s hard to know but this is a good possibility.
  • Finally, I’ve spent the last few weeks listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History series on World War I called Blueprint for Armageddon. He does his usual amazing job, but it makes me worry. Whither Europe?

In summary, uncertainty abounds, regret is already appearing, and I think the stakes are higher than most think. But hey, democracy can’t be wrong.

Chaotic Pho

Pho Dac Biet

I read these couple of paragraphs in Lucky Peach magazine just a few days ago and loved everything about it. Full credit to author Calvin Godfrey.

Pho purists often claim not to have a favorite spot in Ho Chi Minh City, and some refuse to eat pho there at all. These types delight in telling you that real pho only exists in Hanoi, or, worse, that the genuine article has vanished entirely, like the Javan tiger.

To those in that camp, every deviation from the Northern idea is an affront to good taste. The fresh herbs Saigonese tear into their bowls are stupid, and don’t get them started on the broth. Too much cinnamon. Too much sugar. Too many onions. Too much fat.

These poor bastards view themselves as starving in some sort of dry Platonic cave, watching shadow noodles devoured before a fire that burns behind them. How sad that they either cannot or will not recognize the hot, sexy swamp bubbling all around them — the throbbing anarchy in which the century-long evolution of pho continues in earnest.

It’s got everything: delicious pho, a rant against the whole idea of authenticity, love of evolved order, a Plato reference, and an implied rant against again so-called cultural appropriation. It’s amazing.

 

 

Lethe and Eunoe

Purgatorio

In Purgatorio, Dante puts the source of the mythical rivers Lethe and Eunoe at the peak of the earthly mountain at the antipodes that is Purgatory. After purging yourself of your sins in ascending through Purgatory, you must wade through the two rivers before entering paradise.

The Lethe (Greek for “forgetfulness”) purges your memory of your sins. The Eunoe (“good mind”) enhances your memory of those good things you accomplished in life.

It’s a nice reminder of moving on in our own personal lives. You can’t really move on to bigger and better things until you put the old issues behind you. Heaven with constant reminders of the problems of the past is not really heaven.

There is also an interesting Buddhist flavor here, reminding you to live in the present. What’s done is done, you’ve accounted for it, now move on.

— Reader’s Note —

I encourage everyone to make the full journey from Inferno to Paradiso. Its best done, in my opinion, by choosing whether you want to read for poetry or read for late medieval Italian historical detail. Doing both at once can be overwhelming. Either way, if you do, definitely check out the Dartmouth Dante Project.

 

Radio and the spirit of the future

Just like TV did not kill radio, I don’t think the internet will ever kill radio. (But, TV is *the* thing this year.)

What the internet has allowed us to do is cut through the morass of similarity in most terrestrial radio and go directly the stations that are doing something interesting, different or wacky. Yes, the internet allows us to “curate” (apologies) our listening, while still relying on others to pick and discover for us. As I explained earlier, I love music but I don’t have the time or patience to pick out everything I listen to. Hence my love of internet radio, Pandora, etc.

So here are some stations I love:

WDVX – old-time country, bluegrass, blues, Americana out of little station outside of Knoxville, TN

WDCB – Chicago’s Home for Jazz

WBGO – Jazz out of Newark, NJ

KPIG – Broadcasting out of Freedom, CA. What more do you need? It’s pretty random.

A Year Without History

I read a lot of history, almost to the exclusion of any other type of book. We’ll that changes today. The challenge is to not read a non-fiction history book for one year. I started at the beginning of April when I picked up Foucault’s Pendulum by Eco. Next up is the 2015 collection if Best American Travel Writing.

I’ll take suggestions to build my list.