Sorbet, Buffalo as Ireland, Whales, Art & Writing Talk, Etc.

Amusing Miscellany (Especially for the Distressed)

Farmers market studies

Salutations, Gentle Reader.

Let’s lighten it up a bit. Surely you have read a surfeit of weighty reflections on today’s many grave issues, maybe have had your own dark thoughts? Some of you have asked me to respond. I’m honored, and may. Others worry about me, and I’m touched. But I’m full. On this outing I’m going to shift keys and discuss some artsy stuff, my own experiments, things I’ve been thinking over or otherwise find interesting. It’s time for sorbet.

The images in this Signal are mostly about colors, which is why I’ve tightened the frame. It sounds stupid to say “about color” because we are surrounded by color as with other aspects of visual perception, and thus composition. But eyeminds tend to see this or that first, or maybe strongest. Matisse is making a point when he talks about his obsession with color, contrasting his work with that of other artists, and perhaps to the work with which he began. For my part, I can recall being asked about a car I had seen, and remembering the make but not the color. Color isn’t usually what I see first, somehow. The arcs of a deer’s torso strike my eye long before I recognize the animal, camouflaged in the woods. In contrast, here, I’m thinking intentionally about color, and variations, not shape or light or whatever.

Not that I’m entirely insensitive to colors. I pick the colors for our walls, and have on occasion mixed paint — we long had a wall painted to match the overly yellow flower mountain goldenbanner. And once, as a young man, I biked from Bonn to Amsterdam. I didn’t really plan my route, figuring I’d follow the Rhine to the sea and then turn right. I ended up on a seaside bike trail (this is Holland). Unbeknownst to me, the trail wound through tulip plantations, which just happened to be in full bloom. Suddenly I was riding, fast, through color. Surprised, blessed? I remember laughing, not because it was funny, but because I was like a small child, so pleased that all I could do was laugh. I can recall laughing like that only one other time, when I first saw aspens at their peak, and found myself swimming in gold.

In response to comments on Not Gaza, Narratives of Security, Fragilities:

As a writer I am working on/with juxtaposition to spur thinking like the ones expressed in John's [the editor] comments--so the text did what I wanted it to do. The technique I'm developing uses the pressure, or gravitational field if you like, of one thing to help us come closer to understanding other things. So I both introduce and remove Gaza, leaving the mind positioned for...well you tell me?

Further analogies might be Japanese rock gardens, or even a well-composed meal. Importantly in these fractured times, the technique is less forceful, less likely to be resisted ex ante, than argument/demonstration.

WAIS Gaza, Gettysburg and a Mother Moose: Juxtaposition as a Call to Thought

I’m delighted to report that Intermittent Signal is already read in over 40 countries, according to Substack analytics. But not in China or Russia, for some reason. Perhaps Substack is blocked? Even Intermittent Signal? I have visited, and have nice things to say about, both countries. At any rate, please share with your friends, especially in China and Russia! It’s free!

My colleague Jack Schlegel published While Waiting for Rain: Community, Economy and Law in a Time of Change, a complex book about Buffalo, New York. We held a conference, and the Buffalo Law Review is publishing a symposium. From the draft of my introduction, citations omitted.

These Symposium contributions are strikingly consonant with WFR and with each other, and for that matter, with much that is commonplace in Buffalo. Broadly speaking, the narrative of decline is uncontested, although what, if anything, might be done is endlessly discussed. Given how hard it is for Americans to agree, a total stranger to the region might find this consensus rather surprising. As Schlegel tirelessly demonstrates, Buffalonians do not agree on much, which is part of the problem with the city. To make matters more curious still, there is a great deal to like in Buffalo and environs. At the conference, and in a subsequent colloquy, Provost and Law School professor emeritus Tom Headrick presented a slew of numbers to suggest that life in Buffalo today was no worse than it had been during the Golden Era, and was in many ways better. In fact, life in Buffalo was pretty good in many respects in comparison to life in other places in the United States. Lies, damn lies, and statistics, of course, but Headrick’s numbers got me to thinking about Buffalo’s narrative of decline.

Schlegel and I have taught together off and on for decades, and it was a pleasure to teach WFR with him in the Finance Colloquium this fall semester. Two new, to me at any rate, ideas emerged from the discussion. First, Buffalo’s understanding of itself as in decline is a relative understanding, as any tale of “decline” must be. Relative to what? As suggested at the beginning of this essay, Buffalo’s markets, and so its conception of itself, must be understood in larger, essentially national, contexts. Unemployment rates or college degrees or other locally measurable things are relevant, but they do not explain the narrative of massive decline. But nor do they disprove the narrative, even insofar as such narratives are falsifiable.

And relative to when? By common consensus, the highwater mark for Buffalo was “the fifties.” The decade is idealized, of course. Schlegel would argue an earlier decade should be idealized, that Buffalo’s structural problems were masked by this and that. As a matter of social fact, however, Buffalonians long for the fifties. In 1950, the heart of the putative Golden Age, the US Census was 158,904,396. In 2023, US population is estimated to be 339,996,563. The nation’s population has more than doubled in the post war era. Such growth is unevenly distributed. Population growth, and so economic growth, has overwhelmingly been elsewhere. As WFR repeatedly documents, in [early date] Buffalo was [one of largest cities]. In [later date] Buffalo was [relatively smaller]. Buffalo simply lost importance, in terms of the economy of the nation, over the years. Denizens of a sports-mad town should well understand that Buffalo’s decline is essentially comparative, a matter of standings.

As our students pointed out, however, something else happened. Buffalo became, if not a “culture” in the round sense used by classical anthropology, at least a “thing” in the sense used by kids today, a locus of shared meanings. Buffalo has become something like the Ireland of US cities, a place where people hail from. Better opportunities elsewhere (“the Carolinas” is the generic reference) cause people to leave. Over the same period, Buffalo went from being regarded as a gem, a prideful place, to the butt of jokes, many of them unkind. Resentment arose, of the kind familiar from country music, in references to “flyover states” and the like, places not taken seriously, and if you are from such places you must not have made it? Such resentment, however, may also bond underdogs to each other. There are Buffalo bars across the country. People get together to eat chicken wings, drink Canadian beer, watch sports, yell about the Bills Mafia and if of a certain age “wide right.” Lake effect snow is a reference point for the country. On a fall Sunday afternoon, “Buffalo” – the “thing” not the place – is a welcoming, working class, at least in demeanor, usually somewhat inebriated and overfed community, almost anywhere in America, and community is hard to come by.

The analogy is only half serious – Ireland is much bigger and older than Buffalo, a “culture” not a “thing” – but there is something in it. Here as there, divisions that bedevil local politics come to seem less significant from away, outside, and what matters is the best and especially warmest version of the associations, images, and emotions evoked by “Buffalo” or “Ireland.” Buffalo is in modest but not insignificant ways shared nationally, and not every town can say that. And from this perspective, WFR emerges as a dizzying Joycean effort, through the waves of erudition, the confusions, the uncertainties and passions, to write the place.

Buffalo Law Review, vol. 71, no. 5 (forthcoming).

And speaking of Western New York: after decades of teaching writing, my friend Rico Robison, a man of great style and a truly elegant skier, has just published The Boy from Nowhere. It’s a memoir of boyhood spent moving about New York state in the 1960s as the family struggles to secure a modest version of the American dream, and to make their lives together work. Attachments made and mostly sundered. Baseball then skiing. Hurts, failures to articulate, and reckonings on what that which could not be said, by these people then, anyway, might mean. Beautifully described, modest yet deeply self-aware, tender and lonely in turns, and in the end, very generous. Just in time for the holidays!

A friend notes an undercurrent of sadness in recent Intermittent Signals, and (kindly, appropriately) seems to worry. There are good reasons for that, thank you very much, but this is not that kind of newsletter. I’m that close to only a few of you. And here’s a little confession: I’ve spent years developing a hyperconscious, generously ironic, bemused yet mildly elegiac tone, and I’m rather proud of it. It seems to be the right voice for addressing the present chapter of the world’s traditional madness, while (another confession) protecting my persona as a thoughtful intellectual (ah, vanity, but leave me this much, please). It’s also gotten easy, or as easy as writing gets. Maybe I’m lazy, and overdoing it. Hey, like I said, tiresome.

Hence sorbet.

I do not “curate” very much (except shoutouts to friends), but I found Sutton Lynch: Whales, from Above sublimely beautiful, and you should see it. Hopeful. Not seriously, but I was almost jealous: this kid has really done something. And a justification for drones, which I didn’t think possible. Really, really great. Enjoy.

Halloween Night. Boo!

There are so many beautiful things, and I know that simple truth can be hard to remember. I struggle to, anyway. Maybe there is a farmers market near you?

Cheers!

— David A. Westbrook