Eclectic Letters #5 — Rebecca Lowe
A classic Chet Baker record, a brilliant board game designer, a berry-ish (or not?) Pinot Noir, a philosopher with a knack for thought experiments, and the California Zephyr.
Cools Out — Chet Baker
I love every track on Chet Baker’s Cools Out, but my favourite track is Pawnee Junction. I could listen to Pawnee Junction — and I have listened to Pawnee Junction — on repeat for a long time. It’s so cool, it makes me feel like a bad-boy guy from a fifties novel. The only possible problem with Cools Out is its lack of singing. This is a problem not because I think singing would enhance Cools Out, but rather because one of my favourite things about Chet Baker is the way in which his singing and his trumpet-playing share this implausible tonal similarity. Let’s imagine you’ve never heard either, so I play you one of the trumpet bits from Cools Out: one of the surlier bits. And let’s imagine I then play you a secret selection of jazz singers, with Chet Baker hidden among the line-up. I bet you’d know which voice was his.
Reiner Knizia
My favourite board game designer is Reiner Knizia. I’ve been meaning forever to search online for anything Reiner Knizia has written about board game design. Although, as it happens, my favourites of his “board games” do not involve boards. These non-board “board games” are Battle Line (a two-person card game, in which you both play nine hands of face-up poker at once, benefitting from Ancient-Greek-themed jokers and competing for red wooden pawn-shaped “flags”), and Kariba (the best of the recent trend for animal-themed small-box games). In The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell says something about using chess as a method for coping with grief. When my dad died, ten years ago, I spent the following days playing Battle Line.
Ten Minutes by Tractor, Pinot Noir
I’ve been to several wineries on the Mornington Peninsula by car, but I haven’t been to Ten Minutes by Tractor — so my views on its Pinot Noir aren’t biased by the predictable beauty of the site (and any restaurant or art gallery you might find there, beside the vines). Rather, I like how this wine looks, in the glass, and as a bottle. Beyond that, I like descriptive names, and it’s fun thinking about whether Ten Minutes by Tractor counts as one. Mostly though, it's just my favourite wine to drink. It has that unmistakable austere yet drinkable Pinot combination. And although various wine critics use berry-focused words to describe it, one of the things I like most about the Pinot by Ten Minutes by Tractor is that I do not taste many berries in it. There’s a board game I like called Le Nez du Vin, which is used by trainee sommeliers to practise identifying wine aromas. (You can read about it in the best wine book, which is Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker). If I play this game enough, perhaps I’ll become someone who tastes all the berries in the Ten Minutes by Tractor Pinot. Until then, it’s my favourite wine.
Judith Jarvis Thomson
I really like the way Judith Jarvis Thomson does philosophy. I often disagree with her conclusions; I think she has odd intuitions; and it annoys me that she ignores premises in obvious need of consideration. But I don’t think there’s anyone better at combining smartness, sincerity, and rigour, in this way that makes you want to stop reading and go do some philosophy yourself. Nozick’s a competitor, but he tries too hard. The two of them are also bound together by their excellent use of the thought experiment — something that gets an unfair rap these days. What a surprise that a technical mechanism, designed to isolate and test abstract ideas, cannot perfectly direct our practical reasoning!
The California Zephyr
A couple of weeks ago, I crossed the Continental 48 on the California Zephyr. If you stick a pin in the map at Chicago (which is in the Midwest: i.e. really quite far to the east), and another pin at the California coast (which is on the actual west), and then you drape a thread over these two pins, you’ll see that I really do mean I crossed it. Thanks to the California Zephyr, I have now been to Utah and Nevada. I’ve stepped onto the platform, late at night, to be in Omaha Nebraska, where Saul Kripke grew up. I’ve seen the entrances to caves where the mountain lions live, in ravines along the Colorado River. I’ve seen how America cohered, back a century before Eisenhower built the highways. There’s an advert on the Amtrak website that says something like, “See parts of America you can only see from a train!”. I used to laugh at this, but I was wrong.
Rebecca Lowe is a political philosopher with a particular interest in rights, freedom, and equality. She’s currently working on a book called Freedom in Utopia, and has a Substack called the ends don’t justify the means. See her website here.
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