DEATH DID NOT WAIT

Un homme de 63 ans décède dans un accident
sur la RD 1005  ledauphine.com  12/12/11

Un homme---Jay Wormus

We received the news through his daughter. Seems he was killed instantly by another driver who ran into him. Three other people were injured but Jay Wormus was killed.  Darkness was falling at this hour---it happened around 5 pm on Sunday December 11th in the Haute-Savoie, not too far from his home.
Like that, dead. One of those accidents that leaves families gravely injured--four generations of family in Jay's case-- and friends stunned, in pain, disbelieving.
I'm writing this because I must.  The loss of Jay hits the community of music friends very hard.
My previous blog described the World Music Project at the UN Staff Christmas event. 
http://lexieintrator.blogspot.com/2011/12/winter-ball-1955-winter-party-2011.html
There he was, less than forty-eight hours earlier, warming up with Get Your Kicks on Route 66, and then during the concert singing Mack the Knife, one of his favorites, with grit, with feeling......

"........When that shark bites, with his teeth, dear
Scarlet billows start to spread
Fancy gloves though wears Macheath, dear
So there's never a trace of red.

Sunday morning on the sidewalk,
Lies a body oozing life
And someone's creeping around the corner,
Could that someone be Mack the Knife?......."

So help us all, Jay was a good man, loved by so many.    


Obituary plus opportunity to write tributes:    
http://www.hommages.ch/Defunt/65377/Wormus_Jay#avis_129594

Winter Ball 1955/ Winter Party 2011

Palais des Nations 1955


She wears a formal dress, pale yellow silk with thin, dark velvet strips tracing bust and waist, he wears a formal black suit and bow-tie, and both are beautiful. I attend the preparations, cross-legged on their bed, in awe of my parents' tailored splendor and the mixed aroma of Mitsouko and Old Spice.


At the entrance to the ball official photographers are armed with film and phosphorus. Flashbulbs fire and die. Flesh is pressed (hand to hand):  Dr. Marcolino Gomes Candau, Secretary-General of the World Health Organization at the Palais des Nations, greets the guests. Flash!....him. Flash!....her. Flash!....them. Flash! Flash! The women do not remove their white gloves.  Wives are decorative and complete the portrait of the successful professional man in the international sphere. The greeting ceremony is followed by dinner, speeches and a formal ball. It runs according to courteous protocol, smiling and perhaps a bit boozy.


In the 1950s International civil servants were all well-to-do by local standards, living in attractive apartments and houses in Geneva and countryside in a quiet post-war economy: 4.27 Swiss francs to the US dollar. There were permanent contracts. Another reason to smile.


Palais des Nations 2011


People wear black coats, red coats, casual anoraks with fur and without, raincoats, sweaters.  The weather is warm for December, so no one shivers in the slow line snaking around poles with guard tape to keep people in a queue. Between Blackberry messages people debate whether the mild temperature is a result of global warming.
They are not waiting for the coat check. They are waiting to have coats and possessions scanned in an official UN scanner. The entrance is no longer the Main Gate at the Place des Nations. This was shifted years ago to the 'Red Cross Gate' after some demonstrators glided through and over 'security' and occupied one or two conference halls--an embarrassment, to put it mildly.
After the bombing of UN personnel in Iraq, the UN spent a lot of money catching up with reality. Concrete and metal barriers are in evidence, compromising the view of the nineteen-twenties design Assembly Hall building from beyond the gates.


Inside the 'New Building' the party is in full swing. The World Music Project, comprising UN organization employees and associates, is tuning up. Saxophones, trumpets, guitars, bass, drums, violin (John), flutes and a line-up of vocals, plus two (!) huge state of the art mixing tables, huge speakers and huge lights. 


The Serpent space looks like a giant singles bar. Most are under thirty-five. I picture SMSs and tweets: "must party @ UN"  "c u @ bar @ 8". The human noise is overwhelming. The crowd is hungry and thirsty, six people deep at the bars, four deep at the food tables. Better to stay put with one samosa and a friend. There's a generous gastronomic spread with guacamole, smoked salmon, delicate pâté canapés and spreads, and steaming hot tables on the other side of the room. However the party began at 7 pm and the food is all gone by 8:15, except for numerous whole pineapples no one can cut. No more white wine. Young people are still streaming in.
The Director-General of UN Office at Geneva, Mr. Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, gives a brief friendly speech and leaves. The whole space is mobbed and few can navigate from one end to the other.  


The musicians have completed their sound-check*, the music is beginning, and the crowd, though not subdued, will be entertained if they aren't too obssessed with those in front of them on the drinks line. Perhaps they should have brought hip flasks, like in the bad old days of the twentieth century.....
The World Music Project kicks off, delivering rhythmic sambas, gypsy songs, Caribbean, jazz classics and world music....a smorgasbord of styles.
Followed by Kassav' with musique antillaise.


Gloves off.  The dancing begins.
(Anyone know how to waltz?)


*Through no fault of their own, the World Music sound-check began fifteen minutes after they were to begin performing, as the guest band Kassav' had priority. Then not all the sound monitors were functioning.  Considering that half the band couldn't hear the other half the music was remarkably good!

ARCHIMEDES

The Archimedes Palimpsest at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore

Blog en travail

GNOMON: musing on words at 40,000 feet.

I first saw the word Gnomon on Mass Ave in 1968 Cambridge, Massachusetts:  Gnomon Copy with its Art Nouveau door newly sanded to essential oak that swirled with début de siècle élan.   Gnomon sounded like a hunchback who lived in an old cellar, or a half-monster crouching mysteriously in one’s thoughts, a kind of intellectual incubus.  Or a very obscure figure of speech.

I enjoyed not knowing the definition for a few months so I could work on my private glossary.  But of course being a bit of a wordie I did look it up and was almost disappointed to learn gnomon is 

1)   the stable post or piece that casts the shadow on a sundial, the shadow that moves aroun as the sun travels east to west in the day sky;

2)   a line on a parallelogram.

Gnomon Copy was next to Harvard Square.  Students after all-nighters with long essays, doctoral dissertations, needing to have their words reproduced—these were the usual clients.  Copy centers were coming into their own, revolutionized by the invention of the photocopy machine, the ascent of Xerox, the miracle of paper reproduction.  No need for printing presses, stinky purple ink printers, hard to correct stencils, mimeographs and such.

* * *

The gnomon of the parallelogram creates a parallel by its very existence,  that which completes the parallel, lines that never meet up. (And what is it that happens with the curve of space-time when our parallel lines go on to infinity?) 
(Perhaps the secret to why they can go on forever is that they never meet and tangle in the first place, as in a long-distance relationship). 

* * *

The sundial was replaced by the analog clock and then eventually the digital. 

The analog clock is what we know best; but it’s the moving arm, not the shadow that shows the time.

The digital timepiece flips numbers at us.  Defining time with numbers only…

But time’s not a given. We learn now that CERN scientists believe they have discovered neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, with additional results and calculations that appear to confirm this.  The measure of our daily science, the speed of light is now fuel for discussion.  Light-years may be redefined. Or superseded (superspeeded?)

* * *

It's 4:30 US time and we are only an hour away from Baltimore.  The sun has been setting for hours, a pink-rose-lavender glow out the right-hand windows of our 767 from Heathrow-- a continuous streak of gorgeous color.  Our plane journeys west and we seem to escort the sun, parallel to it.  The horizon holds no mountains or clouds right now, so the horizon is pure, ending somewhere at the end of our vision.
* * *
A gnomon enables us determine time of day, using light, revealing by shadow.  

* * *

As a small child the night sky scared me because there were planets and moons and stars and galaxies so far away they were part of what I thought of as 'the infinity'.  It was accompanied by fear of space, space without shadow, or space as huge unfathomable shadow, an existential terror; the concreteness of death and the remoteness of something without end.

* * *

I’ve never had a real guru or mentor.  I tried not to listen to my parents. I admired my piano teacher and a number of academics whose paths I crossed, yet I was anti-mentor, and by age 17, not wanting to be guided, was mistrustful and independent-minded, isolated and unprepared.  So be it.   I was lacking a 'gnomon' who could cast a protective shadow, telling me what time it was and why and how one could view it, interpret it.  How to work with science.  How to pray, or how to meditate on it all.

Without a gnomon I was, in fact quite déboussolée --- disoriented, not knowing my magnetic north, not knowing what I wanted to do when I grew up.  

My compass still spins, but not as fast. 

* * *

The lid of my computer stands at 90 degrees, a sort of laptop gnomon. It is computer day when the top is open, the computer awake.  I read, I write. Top closed, it is computer night, there is no gnomon,  only the white apple shining through the silver crust.

* * *

The sunset colors have turned dull, the sky a deep blue. We seem to have caught up with night. The cabin crew is coming around economy class with plastic sandwiches, preparing us to alight on another continent.

                                                           Man as Gnomon......!

Blog-shy: how I (mis)manage my time

So I've been a bit blog-shy for the past couple of weeks. Sometimes I'm too busy, other times, despite the  words arranging themselves in my brain, I don't actually do anything about them, so they either vanish or fester, or in the best case scenario, come to slow maturity like a good cru bourgeois.
I wish.
Some ideas are too intimate for the blogosphere.  Or too over-arching and in need of some supportive architecture, flying buttresses of thought.  Damned if I have the time to build up those buttresses when I'm reinforcing core muscles and abs with my dear slave-driver of a Pilates teacher. But I make time for my Pilates once a week in exchange for English lessons, and we each feel we have a great deal.  There's time for group gym once a week and semi-private gym training once a week, luxuries I accepted when I realized after fifteen years of self-flagellation (not good exercise) I would never do upper body work unless someone made me do it.  Thank you Virginie, thank you Nick. And then there's always the rewarding plat du jour after Pilates, during which I really do teach English, and then the fine cafeteria where I must eat copiously to build up strength for afternoon workouts after Shakespeare class...........There's time for the two choirs and classical voice lessons with a terrific teacher.  There's time to attend John's jazz concerts, visit with friends, help out friends, transport friends, go to MetOpera broadcasts, travel to Paris (last week) to help out family, which turned into a medley of long daily hospital visits with a well-loved relative, and tourism, using my new iphone GPS to navigate on foot, and iphone metro map to navigate the Metro.  Time to read the press in French and English, time for John to read me Underworld by Don deLillo (wow), time to feed nine cats and clean the kittens' litter, do housework & other paperwork obligations I won't bore you with.
I mismanage writing time.  I have blogs blogging in my head, so it's time to get serious about Time for Blogging and Other Writing Projects.


Meanwhile we leave before dawn tomorrow for four days in Spain with dear friends.  So much for serious.  But I am, I really am. Serious.

Le beau château de Paul Claudel. A weekend.

We were invited to stay at the Château de Brangues en groupe--several of us with seeing-eye labradors on- and off-duty cavorting on the lawns.  It's a real castle, the kind that has you dreaming history.....

Our hostess Annabelle is the great-granddaughter of Paul Claudel, the 19th-20th century French writer, poet, Catholic, dignitary, diplomat, playwright, world traveller, académicien and controversial personality.

Politics can look quite different in the version originale. 
To be continued.

In one of the (several) drawing rooms:  Rania on piano and John on fiddle.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf bis: note on the 1993 Liberia talks in Geneva

Ref.  http://lexieintrator.blogspot.com/2011/10/ellen-johnson-sirleaf.html

As a member of the UN conference secretariat, I don't feel comfortable revealing all of my observations, as I still consider what went on there confidential.  Also--memory may serve, but then again not always.

A clear description of the events can be found in this book:
Building Peace in West Africa: Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-Bissau 
by Adekeye Adabajo, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder, CO. 2002 192 pp.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

See also http://lexieintrator.blogspot.com/2011/10/additional-note-about-liberia-talks-in.html

It's always good to see a deserving person win the Nobel Peace Prize,  particularly someone you have worked with.

I was the fly on the wall, or to put it in a more refined way, I was the conference secretary (small s) seated by the wall, assigned in Geneva to the Liberia peace talks, which brought warring factions to the conference table in the Council Chamber of the Palais des Nations in the summer of 1993.
I worked for Trevor Gordon-Somers, an impressive man who had spearheaded the effort.  It had been no mean task to get an array of factions, some of them very violent, to sit down in what felt like a War Chamber.  A positive outcome was  not a given.

It was extremely intense and tense over those two days. In the support offices of the 'secretariat' Gordon-Somers welcomed negotiators to draft their statements there.  He retained his calm and perspective. There was one other secretary who was brought over from Monrovia, the fastest typist I'd ever met.

The final night of the negotiations was incredible.  Gordon-Somers requested that I stay on through the entire night, having worked the entire previous day.  I stayed, and it was a long haul of drafting the final statement, an agreement that hopefully all could sign off on. Endless hours of discussion, editing, sitting around, more discussion, more editing, more drafting.
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf steered them through this painful, laborious task, not letting up. When it looked like they couldn't get through it, she continued until the final statement was done.

At all times dignified and steady, with all the hallmarks of a leader.  Most impressive.

Present were:
Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL)
National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL)
United Liberation Movement(s) of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMOs K and J)
L'ECOMOG (Economic Community of West African States Cease-fire Monitoring Group, 


Among the observers:
UN  United Nations
OAU  Organization of African Unity
ECOWAS  Economic  Community of West African States   


See also http://www.c-r.org/our-work/accord/liberia/profiles.php
A brief summary of the meeting:
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1993-07-18/news/9307180511_1_liberia-peace-package-end-the-war

Concise animal poem

'Sssssuch sssssenescent ssssssssskinnn.....' 
 goes the snake 
                    abandoning it.

OK, it's not just elks...

She has connections with the other world, or is it with the other room?

Famous British psychic Sally Morgan.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/20/psychic-sally-morgan-hears-voices

Poor lamb, her prompter forgot to close the door. Aieee!

Mövenpick & Morals

There's been feedback on the coffee blog.  Coffee consumption and morals--rich!
http://lexieintrator.blogspot.com/2011/09/what-would-immanuel-kant-say-about.html
I'm posting some reactions:

Of course, we "Kant be sure" about how Havelaar coffee is produced; 

I have to  assume  that their claims to "fairness in trade" are truthful.

And based on that assumption, I will buy Havelaar bananas in preference

to Chiquita. Sheldon Kopp, a wonderful psychiatrist-author, said in

his "Eschatological Laundry List":

- We must live with the ambiguity of partial freedom, partial power, and partial knowledge.

And

- All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data. 

I think the important thing is not whether our actions are indeed ethically correct -

with our partial knowledge, who knows.. they may turn out in reality not to be so -

but whether we are impelled to take these actions on the basis of ethical principles ! DL

Interesting piece. I should put you in touch with my cousin who has a coffee thing in Mexico, a type of cooperative she and her husband are involved with, and she's quite opposed to Fair Trade coffee.
There's an old Claire Bretecher cartoon about three yuppies, and one starts taking off this piece of clothing and that for political reasons and refusing this and that food for the same reason, then at the end, says that it's impossible to be a genuine revolutionary any more...LF

As for ethical coffee... having spent my formative years in the NGO world I've drunk enough revolting "campaign coffee" to last a life-time - what, you never heard of campaign coffee? Disgusting muck, launched on an unsuspecting world by Oxfam, enabling us to consume caffeine with a clear conscience (and maybe just a hint of smug self righteousness). As there was little else on offer, I drank gallons of the stuff in my youth - I paid my dues and now feel I've earned the right not to question where the coffee comes from! PH


You are something!!!!!!!! Now I can't even drink my morning coffee (and I have been saving the Mövenpick for a special treat)  without considering ethical dilemmas and whether the workers were exploited while picking the beans and what my position should be not just about the coffee choice but about all the political agendas around me. Am I living the life of an ostrich much of the time here in l'il ol' Groton?????? MV

You like Mövenpick Coffee, enjoy it!  Don't go on a guilt trip everytime you have some. MP

Does this mean you don't buy Exquisito anymore?????   PF


Vigorous reactions, with multiple ?? and !!
(fuelled by caffeine no doubt)

Swedish hangover---Elk in crisis

A homeowner in southern Sweden got a shock when he found 
a drunken elk stuck in his neighbour's apple tree.  

"The animal was apparently on the hunt for fermenting apples when 

she lost her balance and became trapped in the tree.  Per Johansson, 

from Saro near Gothenburg, found the elk making a roaring noise

in the garden next door. He called the emergency services, who 

helped him free the boozed-up beast by sawing off branches.  She 

spent the night recovering in the garden. The next day she took 

herself off into the woods with her hangover."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14842999 

   The one in the photo is comical, all splayed legs, hard to tell which eye is up.  
   If I laugh am I callous and indifferent to suffering?  
   Well no.
   I realize it's hazardous to have tipsy elk hanging around the garden, snorting apples and threatening family members.*
   However I also have the elk's fundamental well-being at heart.  Consider the situation from the elk's point of view----there are no programs in Europe for treating alcoholism in elks!**

   This is clearly an elk with issues of substance abuse.  In a country like Sweden, she should be entitled to a proper government-funded residential detox and rehab program.  A three-step or ten-step program for follow up.  Without it she might become a repeat offender--shock another neighbor, get into fights, get tangled in another tree, mess up her liver.
   Elk haven't made it down to urban Geneva yet, maybe because we don't let our apples ferment outside of vats, and we create alcohol exclusively for human consumption.    
   Having said that, I just remembered there are some rotting apples at the base of two trees in our garden. I'll have to keep an eye on the cats, who have been spending more time down there lately.....

-----

*A man was recently acquitted of murdering his wife when forensic tests showed the presence of elk hair and saliva on her person, presumably belonging to the four-legged suspect, who never bothered to show up in court. Yes sir, it was the elk.      http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8384143.stm
** to my knowledge

What would Immanuel Kant say about Mövenpick coffee?

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/

During my brief introduction to philosophy at university, I made the passing acquaintance of Immanuel Kant and his categorical imperative.  It sounded like a cool principle, though I couldn't get my head around how rationality played such a central role in determining one's duty.

In Geneva there's a choice of many kinds of coffee.  There's mocha, Viennese roast, dark roast, espresso roast, arabica 100%, arabica/robusto.....you choose.  There's bio, organically grown. And there's ethical coffee 'café éthique' or 'café équitable' (sic) cultivated and harvested by workers who apparently enjoy better working conditions in plantations with a conscience. There are organic bananas and ethical bananas and organic ethical bananas.

After World War II many boycotted German and Japanese cars.  In the seventies many of us boycotted lettuce, then grapes to show solidarity for exploited farm workers who went out on strike, led by the courageous late César Chavez. *

From the seventies onward many people have boycotted Nestlé for their hard-sell of baby formula in poor countries with unsafe water supplies and implying that breast-feeding was less healthy for an infant. A cousin boycotts Walmart because of their poor treatment of workers, especially women.  Others have boycotted DuPont, Monsanto, Reynolds and others for being defense contractors supporting US military aggression.  Products such as Welch have been shunned because of known political affiliations. People have tried to boycot Chinese products (difficult), French, Iranian, Israeli and American imports--human rights abuses, political positions, government violence, tyranny, etc. ** Come to think of it, the original Boston Tea Party (the real American Tea Party) was a form of boycott.

The question is:  if I want to act ethically and want think of myself as an ethical person (and most people do)  how do I make consumer choices?  And what effect will these choices have on 1) my life 2) on other people's lives?
Kant says it doesn't matter what the outcome is, the importance lies in the action itself based on one's interpretation of the true moral action, what one must do.  In fact he wouldn't tell us to buy only ethical coffee in order to support poor workers.  He would tell us to buy only ethical coffee because it is one's moral duty to do so.***

By purchasing one non-ethical and one ethical bag of coffee what am I doing?  Hedging my bets?  Buying myself an economy-class seat in heaven?  (Also should I be calling the one that's not 'fair-trade' non-ethical?  Is the fair-trade one really less exploitative?  One could only know by going to the coffee plantations and checking out each situation personally).

For now I choose one bag of each.  In so doing  I'm soothing my conscience. I'm helping the fair-trade industry in a small way, but I'm not avoiding or boycotting the other. I'm not wholly good.
One bag for the taste buds, the other for the developing nations.
(Une pour les papilles, l'autre pour le tiers-monde).
One Mövenpick and one house ethical coffee.

Immanuel, please look the other way.

* His younger brother Richard, who died earlier this year, was invited to the White House by President Obama in 2010.  During apartheid we boycotted South African grapes and Outspan oranges.  César Chavez co-founded the United Farm Workers Union with Dolores Huerta.  Also, during apartheid we boycotted South AFrican grapes and Outspan oranges.  

** And of course for health (scare) reasons people have refused to buy British meat (BSE), US meat (hormones in cattle), Spanish and German (epidemic of food poisoning which turned out to be from consuming toxic sprouts). I've surely left out many others.

*** Kant said that we all experience an innate moral duty. The existence of the conscience and feelings of guilt and shame tell us when we violate this moral duty. He believed that our moral duty could be revealed to us through reason, objectively. His theory was based solely on duty. He said that to act morally is to perform one’s duty, and one’s duty is to obey the innate moral laws   http://members.fortunecity.com/rsrevision/kantandthecatimp.html

Bicontinental Drift -- return to the continent -- but which one?

Bicontinental.  Sounds glamorous, flashy, all jet-setty.  But there's a real kicker.     

I adore flying across the Atlantic, but it can be painful:  it involves the flip of my dual self. Heads I'm here, tails I'm there.  Heads I'm there, tails I'm here.  However it's done they are two sides of the same coin.
And that coin is me.
When the flight takes off from Cointrin I can be emotional.  When the Swiss Airbus turns and dips over the mountains and heads west toward America I'm really spinning.

The reality is I live in Ferney-Voltaire, just outside the tiny metropolis of Geneva. I'm neither French nor Swiss. I vote for the President of the United States.  Most family members and close friends live in the US. When I'm there it feels like home, when I'm in Ferney I'm already planning my next trip over.   
The US is the world for me, ça foisonne, ça grouille!
But I love it here--- I would hate to give it up.
So here I am, straddling two continents and needing both.  I'm not alone--it's the twenty-first century and we are so very mobile. Roots are perhaps easier to pull up, but not without pain. 

Let's hear it for double heimatschmerz.

Good Night Irene....

New York City was prepared to face Irene. When it turned out not to be a worst case scenario, some people complained that too much fuss was made--they hadn't been to New Orleans. But Irene caused floods near Philly and some bad stuff on the east coast farther south.  In Montreal it was sufficiently blustery,  but Trudeau Airport was open and running and I left for Geneva late Sunday afternoon. 

This poem posted on Poetry.org is a different take on the aftermath of a hurricane.  You can read it a dozen more times and keep reading into it.  This poet is for real.

The Hurricane

by William Carlos Williams

The tree lay down
on the garage roof
and stretched, You 
have your heaven,
it said, go to it.

The battered tree is chilling out on the roof, enjoying its new-found freedom, basking in it.  It could be....silver lining of a hurricane....complete acceptance of unexpected fate....the desired recumbent position after a lifetime upright....the tree has been ravished by the hurricane and is in post-ravishment bliss....

And why are we hearing advice from a fallen tree? Is it a wise old oak? 

Are we less aware, more foolish than dead wood and should we tune into trees? 
Does he identify with the tree? Is he tired of being a doctor?
Does the tree simply want to be left alone and not be sawed up into logs and kindling?
Is this a joke on himself?

Reminds me of his poem-note on a bowl of plums. "This is just to say".  
Coy, complete and open to interpretation. http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/wcw.plums.html 
                                                                                   

PS I don't have a hard copy of the poem to compare--wondering about the comma after stretched.