7/22/23

 Saturday, July22, 2023

In bed at 9:10, up at 5:40 with backache and thoughts of Oppenheimer.  Let Lilly out.  63℉, high of 78, mostly sunny morning, mostly cloudy later, AQI=48, Good.  The wind is WSW at 6 mph, 3-6/12. No rain.  The sun rose at 5:32 and will set at 8:23, 14+52.    

Hearing and Hearing Loss.  An op-ed in this morning's NYT caught my eye, reminding me of Merlin and me and my quiet mornings on the patio.  "The Birds Are Singing, but Not for Me" by  David George Haskell:  "Where I live in the Southeast, late spring is marked by the songs of blackpoll warblers, tiny black-and-white birds migrating from South America to the boreal forests of Canada where they breed. They’re here for a week just as the school year ends and tomato-planting season begins, a joyful time. This year, I heard none. My partner, though, could hear their high-pitched song and pointed the birds out as they flitted in the treetops.  The sonic erasure felt deeply unsettling. I could hear other everyday sounds — passing cars, cardinals whistling, neighborhood kids at play — but the blackpoll’s song was gone."  The ornithology app on my iPhone hears more than I do.

The other day there was a story in the WaPo: "Hearing aids may cut the risk of cognitive decline by nearly half."  It put me in mind of Jimmy in his late 80s with significant hearing loss, constant problems with his hearing aids, and how it all contributed to his social isolation and confusion.

And my recent throne room reading includes this from Leaves of Grass, 26:

Now I will do nothing but listen,

To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.

I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals,

I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,

I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,

Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,

Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals,

The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,

The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence,

The heave'e'yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the refrain of the anchor-lifters,

The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color'd lights,

The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,

The slow march play'd at the head of the association marching two and two,

(They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)

. . . . . . 

Was ever any poet, or any human being, more alive than Walt Whitman?  'I hear bravuras of birds', marvelous.

LTMW  I see some chickadees are the first to show up for some early morning seeds but the red finches aren't far behind, enjoying seeds and orange juice.  These finches, often paired up, are becoming favorites of mine.  They remind me of our windowsill visitors at the Knickerbocker.

NICHOLAS KRISTOF: With Israel, It’s Time to Start Discussing the Unmentionable

"Israel is in the headlines, evoking tumultuous debate. Yet one topic remains largely unmentionable, so let me gingerly raise it: Is it time to think about phasing out American aid for Israel down the road?  This is not about whacking Israel. But does it really make sense for the United States to provide the enormous sum of $3.8 billion annually to another wealthy country? . . . Aid to Israel is now almost exclusively military assistance that can be used only to buy American weaponry. In reality, it’s not so much aid to Israel as it is a backdoor subsidy to American military contractors, which is one reason some Israelis are cool to it."

Worse yet, we have to borrow money from China and increase our deficits and national debt to subsidize Israel and our arms industry.

War is Hell.  The lead headline in this morning's WaPo: "Ukraine is now the world’s most mined country. It will take decades to make it safe.  An area larger than Florida is now a wasteland of unexploded ordnance that could take hundreds of years and billions of dollars to undo." And the land becomes more lethal every single day as Ukraine fires American-made and American-provided 155mm cluster bomb artillery shells.  H. L. Mencken: "To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason and "In the long run all battles are lost, and so are all wars."  CDC: Wars are never 'over.'  The underlying enmity and greed and wickedness live on in different forms, different circumstances, but always present, always pending, ready to erupt again.

Oppenheimer.  I took in the 12:30 matinee of this movie yesterday, drawn to it for 2 specific reasons plus the overarching importance of the Manhattan Project and the development and use of nuclear weapons.  The narrower reasons were (1) my visit to Hiroshima in 1965, and (2) the fact that my Uncle Donald 'Bud' Healy was a machinist who worked on the Manhattan Project.  I don't know what his job or role was but he and my Aunt Mary Horigan lived for a time at Los Alamos.   

It was my first visit to a movie theater in more than 3 years, since before the pandemic.  Notes: (1) The ticket cost only $7.39, weekday matinee price plus senior discount, (2)  The sound system in the auditorium was painfully loud, even for an old guy with hearing loss and tinnitus. (3)  The 12:30 'showtime' was misleading.  There were fully 20 minutes of 'coming attractions' followed by another 5 minutes of commercials and a greeting from Marcus Theaters before the film started.  The 'coming attractions" were painfully loud PLUS they were produced and edited in such a way as to make them as attention-demanding, i.e., annoying, as possible.  (4)  Very few people were at the showing and they were all old timers, not surprising I suppose.  (5) The 3-hour movie required one pit stop.

About the film: (1) A major problem - I'd be surprised if I understood half of the lines of the film's dialogue.  Part of it may have been due to the auditorium's volume setting, or perhaps just a crappy sound system.  More likely it was my general inability to make out words in songs and movies.  I need closed captions.  I need to buy the DVD when it is released or get it at the library so I can watch it again with captions and better sound control.  (2)  I didn't know much about Oppenheimer other than he was a scientist connected with the development of the atom bomb.  I didn't know that he was Jewish or that he lost his security clearance because of his associations with communists.  I didn't know he was one of the early researchers on quantum mechanics and also on astrophysics and 'gravitational collapse' a/k/a black holes.  He was clearly quite a genius.  (2) The film reminded me of the hysteria about communists when I was a youngster.  It was the era of the John Birch Society and right-wing, anti-communist fanatics looking under every rock and behind every tree for a communist.  Oppenheimer's security clearance was taken away in 1954, the same year Joe McCarthy was staging his infamous hearings on communist infiltration in the Army and other components of the U.S. government.  I can remember those televised hearings, with McCarthy and his lawyer Roy Cohn, and Attorney Joseph Welch's famous "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?  Have you left no sense of decency?"  But I don't remember anything of Oppenheimer in those awful years.  I turned 13 in 1954 and was in 8th grade.  How interesting that it is acceptable on the right wing to call opponents "Communists," not just Socialists.  (3) The movie depicts an example of 'the weaponization of governments.'  Oppenheimer's enemies included J. Edgar Hoover & the FBI, and Eisenhower's nominee for Secretary of Commerce, Lewis Strauss, whom JRO had once embarrassed.  They used the Atomic Energy Commission to bring JRO down by suspending his security clearance and making him ineligible for any government work.

I need to watch and listen to this film at home on a DVD to try to get more out of it.  Ann Hornaday, the WaPo's chief film critic, lauded the film and wrote "[T]he dialogue in “Oppenheimer” is scrupulously comprehensible — a victory for anyone who has found Nolan’s sound mixes to be unintelligible in the past."  My inability to make out the words in that dialogue makes me want to keep trying.

An Awful, Sinking Feeling is upon me.  I had a box full of original materials and working papers from when I worked on drafting my memoir.  Among the treasures that I believe were in it were original documents with rules and regulations for those living in Los Alamos while working on the Manhattan Project.  I had placed the box between a basement wall and an end table next to my basement recliner.  I went down to retrieve those Manhattan Project papers this afternoon and the box was not where I had placed it.  I searched in the storage agrea of the basement and in the workroom area but no luck.  Is it possible that I three it out when I was trashing a bunch of other stuff from my mildewed  Pandora boxes?  It's hard for me to believe that I would have trashed that historical stuff en masse, i.e. the whole box, but if not, where is it?  The thought that I may have sent those papers to a landfill sickens me.