Between City

A week ago I attended the ELO/MITH Symposium on the Future of Electronic Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. It had been a long time since I'd seen many of my friends and colleagues from what we used to call the hypertext community, and it was wonderful to catch up on what they were doing.

My first job upon returning was to write it up as a feature article for Arts Hub (subscription, sorry), my masters in Melbourne, since ostensibly I went on their nickel for just such purpose. That deadline met, I'm now sorting through my take-aways, and as soon as I get fully unpacked, I'll post a proper trip report.

In the meantime, I'd like to recommend to you, gentle reader, that you clear out some reading time for the first volume of the Electronic Literature Collection, published last October, and available for free both online and on a CD you can get by sending a non-virtual print artifact requesting it to ELO at its new home.

I'm enchanted by the work of J.R. Carpenter, whose short piece The Cape appears in the ELCvol1. I followed a link to other work, and was intrigued by ENTRE VILLE, that appeared at Web Biennial 07 at the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum.

On a single page, an open notebook appears, with a text box on the verso, containing some eight short poems (or sections of one poem) in a simple scrolling text box, and on the recto a line drawing of the front of an apartment building. Many of the windows and doors are rollovers, and clicking opens a windoid that plays a short QuickTime video depicting what you might call a landscape shot of the immediate environment of the building, where one imagines the author lives. In a halo around the notebook pages are isolated objects such as a telephone pole, a mismatched pair of gloves, a Canadian 8¢ stamp, two Montréal postmarks, house number plates, and a graffito. The only animal life depicted visually in the work is an old dog with what looks like a giant cigarette in its mouth, and two diving boys on the stamp — but human voices are heard in much of the ambient noise of the videos.

It's a scorching summer day in Montréal, and the slow lazy movements of the camera, the limp clothes and curtains barely moving in the weak breeze, depict a kind of stunned happiness, or at least peace, except for the old Greek lady in the first poem — "Foul-mouthed for seventy/ her first-floor curses fill/ my second floor apartment;/ her constant commentary/ punctuates my day."

Almost everyone's got a summer-in-the-city memory like this one. It's lovely to relive mine through exploring Carpenter's elegant version of hers.
 

A tale that is told...

The idea that our life is a story is by no means new. Thus the great bard Shakespeare said that life"... is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." (Macbeth) However, it took philosophers some time to discover the philosophical import of this view of life. It was actually a German chap called William Schapp who first gave this age-old idea a philosophical twist. He maintained that we live our lives in a host of stories, which have connection with the stories of other people in various ways; so actually our selves are nothing but cross-sections of stories. Our identities are created by a vast web of stories, as is our relationship with reality. We understand and identify things by placing them in the stories we tell about them: just like selves, things do not really exist outside of stories. We are caught in this narrative web because we cannot exist outside of it. There is a world-wide web of stories: the world is that web.
— Stefan Snaevarr, "Don Quixote and the Narrative Self," in Philosophy Now, Issue 60.

---

pareidolia: the perception of patterns where none exist (some recent, "real" examples: Jesus' face in a tortilla, the Virgin Mary's outline in a semimelted hunk of chocolate, Mother Teresa's profile in a cinnamon bun).
— David P. Barash, "The DNA of Religious Faith," The Chronicle Review, April 20.

Happens with computing all the time: "You piece of shit! Why are you doing this to me?!!"
 

Write down certain things (not others)

In a motel in Iowa City I looked at the journal of the first day and a half of my trip. I've learned to write down certain things I've seen rather than the banal thoughts that don't bear rereading, or when you do reread them your soul yawns in the stuffy air...
— David, in Jim Harrison's Returning to Earth, 187.

Chess Club

In 8th grade, I was a founding member of the Chess Club, which met on Tuesdays during Activity period. I'd originally tried to join the Science Club, but found out that there were two Science Clubs: the one that looked through telescopes and studied the stars was full by the time I got there, and I had to take the other one, the one that did Nature hikes on Saturdays and studied pond scum. Didn't last long there.

The default Activity if you weren't in a Club was Study Hall, and I already had a couple of those, like the other nerdy boys who found homework pretty easy and hadn't joined (or couldn't get into) a Club. After a few weeks, to stave off boredom for the endless 53 minutes of the period, a couple of us brought in portable chess sets and started playing. And naturally the rest of us wanted to watch and kibbitz.

My playing was decidedly second-tier; the real killers were Rich Kenny, Ivan Mann, David Snyder, and Charlie Obler — all of them not coincidentally great at math. Well, Rich was more like a normal person at math (though still better than me), but his native intelligence was keen, and his spirit indomitable, which made him a dangerous opponent, unlike the others, who were usually satisfied with outsmarting each other. Rich had the killer instinct, and liked to destroy his adversary; more than once he got caught in a sneaky checkmate because he was too busy mounting Sherman's March through his opponent's backfield.

At first Mr. Nyswaner, a shy Norwegian in his first year as a teacher (which got him stuck with study hall — no club for him either), was inclined to let this go on, perhaps believing that it did no harm, and certainly out of pity for us, since the rest of our social lives were so obviously inept. But one day, after we'd already set up our chess boards and were well into Round 1 of our weekly tournament, Mr. Nyswaner suddenly materialized behind Rich, who was just bringing out his Queen for a vicious assault on Charlie's front line of pawns, and told us to put the games away. We looked at him stupidly.

(In those days, you didn't talk back to your teachers — i.e., didn't ask why when they told you to do something you didn't want to do. You looked at them stupidly, as if they'd spoken to you in a foreign language. Sometimes this would flummox the teacher in question, resulting in a cascade of explanations and justifications, and once in a while she (or more rarely he) would retire from the field in embarrassment, and you could go on doing whatever it was they didn't want you to do. The older teachers would simply repeat the command sharply, and the implied threat of physical consequences, should you fail to obey at once, was not an idle one: laws against corporal punishment in schools were years away — the chances were good that if your parents found out a teacher had slapped you in school you'd get slapped when you got home. Ah, the dear dead days.)

In this instance, the pole-axed look we gave Mr. Nyswaner was real — what was he talking about? We weren't playing games, this was *chess*. But our hesitation broke his confidence, and he started to backpedal, saying it was distracting the other students who were trying to work; besides, this was a study hall, not a game room. He went back to his desk, very red in the face, and resumed whatever it is that teachers do when they're not teaching.

This presented an awkward situation. He hadn't stayed to make sure we put our chess sets away, so maybe he wasn't really serious. On the other hand, if we went back to playing, it would constitute a direct flouting of his authority, and because he was new, we didn't know where the line was with him. Still, what was he saying? That playing chess was somehow illegal? Then why'd he let us do it for so long?

Having been a teacher myself for over three decades, I can now plausibly reconstruct what had happened. Mr. Nyswaner was a newbie, and wanted everybody to like him. In the teachers' lounge one day, during a round of Listen To What Those Idiot Kids Did Today, he'd tried to impress his elders with the funny story of the geeky boys playing chess in his Tuesday study hall. No doubt they'd looked at him stupidly, unable to comprehend how he'd permitted such a Bohemian situation to develop. He'd faltered, stammered, maybe even asked for advice, having realized his only hope of survival in this rural high school was to cringe back into his colleagues' good graces.

I'm pretty sure his mentor in this would have been Mr. Douglas, the avuncular ruddy Scot who taught math and liked to punch you jovially on the upper arm (right where it hurts the most), by way of saying, "You're not gonna act up in MY math class, now ARE you, Laddie?" Grasping Mr. Nyswaner's upper arm (right where it hurts the most), Mr. Douglas likely told him in a firm but friendly voice that if he didn't nip this little insurrection right in the bud, he'd have chaos on his hands in that study hall. Mr. Douglas knew boys like that: he'd been one of them.

Chaos in the Classroom: the worst catastrophe you can incur your first year out — you don't come back from a C in the C.

Now Mr. Nyswaner was in a bind. His fledgling reputation as a nice guy had already earned him the condescension, if not yet the scorn, of the oldest and nastiest of his colleagues, I'm pretty sure of that, but Douglas was a man whose respect he could not afford to lose; he'd have to do something about our "little insurrection," whether he wanted to or not. So he gave it his best shot.

But Rich, as I said, had the killer instinct, and he smelled irresolution in Nyswaner's order for us to stop — Nyswaner would never get physical with us, twerpy as we were: he didn't have the nerve.

I was standing behind Charlie watching the game; Rich was facing the front, where Mr. Nyswaner had just sat down and was fussing with a pile of exam books. When I turned back from looking stupidly at Nyswaner, Rich had that hard gleam in his eye I'd seen so many times before when he was about to do something crazy, just to discombobulate his opponent (worked every time with me). He picked up his Queen and plowed into Charlie's secondary, taking the pawn right in front of the King. "Check," Rich said, loudly enough to be heard out in the hall.

Now Charlie was likely the only real genius among us (the senior math teachers used to ask him for help with their equations), which also made him the weakest chess player in the top tier, because he couldn't comprehend the illogical moves the rest of us would make when we didn't know what else to do. This was about the stupidest move he'd ever seen — the Queen was completely unprotected — and he looked at Rich for a moment, utterly baffled.

But Rich wasn't looking at Charlie, and it was soon apparent why: the defiant expression on Rich's face drained away, and a shadow loomed over the board: Nyswaner had returned. He said not a word, just stood there, a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier, and stared Rich down. The rest of us silently slithered from the field.

In response to his humiliation, Rich turned activist. I'm not sure of the sequence here, but I believe it's no coincidence that about this time he launched the samizdat journal The Pickpocket's Packet (described elsewhere), in which he editorialized in favor of official recognition of the Chess Club. He circulated petitions and lobbied his classmates to sign, and even enlisted faculty support — his advocate in this crusade was, perhaps not surprisingly, Mr. Douglas, who must have admired the boy's spunk, because he had, after all, been just such a bairn himself, once upon a time.

So the Chess Club became an official Activity, with Mr. Douglas as its Advisor (he even joined in once in a while, when an odd number of players showed up); Mr. Nyswaner survived a challenge to his authority, and his rookie year as a teacher; Rich Kenny learned the limits of aggression, the effectiveness of diplomacy, and the rudiments of publishing; and I got this story to tell.

This story is one of my favorites, the kind that I tell eventually to every new friend, once we get past the acquaintance stage. It's a tale of daring, of resolution in the face of bureaucratic oppression, of perseverence and resourcefulness — and it has a happy ending. Best, it's about geeks, who've become fashionable characters in American lore ever since technology took over our lives.

But back in the day, we were ridiculed and picked on, because we were puny and talked funny and read all the time. In Science class, when Charlie and David made a computer, housed in a cigar box and wired with Xmas lights, that could add and subtract, they got no awards from their classmates, who were vying with each other for prizes we didn't have a prayer of even competing for — popularity, esteem, good looks.

It was a heady experience to actually succeed in making a place in the world, however circumscribed, for our otherwise incompetent selves. It made us feel like men, however short of stature and shrill of voice, to marshall our forces, make our case, and win official recognition of something that was important enough to fight for.

A short-lived victory, as it turned out. The following summer half of us went through puberty and moved on to more grown-up things; the rest of us, left behind by that rapture, lost heart and fell back on reading science fiction in study hall, the cheap pocket paperbacks tucked inside our math text, to be sure — no one but Douglas would check, and he was an sf fan himself. We served out our sentence of humiliation with fatalism, and consoled ourselves with the dream of someday saving our benighted planet with brilliant schemes our former colleagues were too doped up on hormones to be able to imagine.

Of course, some of us did better than others at class reunions some years later...

Geeks' Nite Out
 

Capt. John Smith on baseball

In "Our Town," a most edifying article in the April 2 New Yorker, Jill Lepore considers the reputation of John Smith, one of the founders of Jamestown, the first successful English colony in what we once innocently termed the New World. Summing up at the end, she addresses the idea some scholars have that Smith was one of early America's best ethnographers. "After all, compared with his contemporaries, Smith was a keen observer," she says, "although it's worth remembering that most of what he saw... was altogether new to him, stranger than strange, and he wasn't always able to make sense of it. Two historians, James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, once tried to imagine how Smith might have reported a July afternoon spent at Yankee Stadium:

Being assembled about a great field of open grass, a score of their greatest men ran out upon the field, adorned each in brightly hued jackets and breeches, with letters cunningly woven upon their Chestes, and wearinge caps... upon their heades, of a sort I know not what. One of their chiefs stood in the midst and would at his pleasure hurl a white ball at another chief, whose attire was of a different colour, and whether by chance or artifyce I know not the ball flew exceeding close to the man yet never injured him, but sometimes he would strike att it with a wooden club and so giveing it a hard blow would throw down his club and run away.

In other words, you can count on Smith for abundant detail, and admirable accuracy, but he's fairly likely to leave out what you most want to know: 'Yankees 10, Red Sox 3.'"
 

See-saw

These big-hearted men, the poets — I don't trust them suddenly. Not that I trust anyone or anything, but... distrust of them is special, cuz they say the truth, or see it & say what they saw, which is never quite the same thing, is it?

Point is, what do I see in their sawing? — to use an antique form, with its seven types of ambiguity: 1) seeing; 2) saying; 3) cutting in, between 2 things once 1, or rather making 2 things of 1; 4) further: taking something apart to build something else, perhaps; 5) or cutting down to size, to make more digestible, by the mind (or the furnace); 6) grinding teeth back & forth, back & forth, wearing something down & down, making it dust; 7) see-sawing, a game for 2, poet & reader, or poet & someone else, as the reader, nonexistent in the poem, looks on in impotence, envy, frustration, rage.
 

Massage Therapist

Every day you touch the slopes
of strangers' bodies; warm,
springy muscles; skin
smelling of garlic, or lotion;
buttocks kneadable as bread dough;
and the funny, sweaty, monkey feet,
freed of their boots and stockings,
lolling passively, nowhere to go.
The whole beautiful landscape
laid out before you like an unmapped country.
And every week at the same time
an old man climbs up on your table.
His only grandchild died last week.
He's kept an orchid from the funeral.
You spread almond oil on your palms
and rub his tough old thighs,
reminding him of the unique shape
of his strength, working
up and down the withered flanks
in a rage of tender concentration,
like a mother brooding over a hurt child.
The ghost of a grin touches his face
when you say it's OK to fart
if he needs to. It's OK to do anything here.

Having lived through more
than a body can stand,
he lays down the unbearable:
Here is the stripped truth of us,
in all its tragedy and ungainly glory.
This is the end of striving and luck.
Everything goes. You touch what's left.

— Alison Luterman, The Sun, October 2005, 31.

So leave it alone

To torment your body, [Buddha] discovered, is really to value it every bit as much as when you coddle it. So leave it alone; do it no harm. Do not harm anything. Time, the recycler, takes care of that job, constantly, dispassionately, inevitably. Which means you're free: free to be nothing, or nothing in particular, which really is freedom when you consider the grief you caused yourself trying to be something special.
— Holland Cotter, review of "Awakening: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan" at the Japan Society, New York Times, April 6, 2007, E31.

He She

He plays a train
She plays a whistle
They move away travel.

He plays a rope
She plays a tree
They swing.

He plays a dream
She plays a feather
They fly.

He plays a general leader
She plays people
They declare war.

— Dunya Mikhail, Iraqui poet living in Michigan, emended by Emna Zghal in War: an Essay (2005).

Inspector of spiders' webs

To appoint oneself... an inspector of spiders' webs for many years in succession, and for long seasons, means joining a not overcrowded profession. No matter: the meditative mind returns from that school fully satisfied.
— Jean-Henri Fabre, quoted in "Spider Woman" by Burkhard Bilger, New Yorker March 5, 2005, 73.

Ghosts

I found this in Ye Antient Blogge:

Every new medium is a machine for the production of ghosts. (Kafka knew this.) As Friedrich Kittler argues [in Grammophon, Film, Typewriter, 1986], "The spirit-world is as large as the storage and transmission possibilities of a civilization." The oldest available print of a printing press is a 1499 image showing skeletons cavorting about a press, pages in hand, doing a dance of the dead. Spiritualists, as we have seen, did the danse macabre of the telegraph, celebrating the spirits conjured by electricity, the first of many in the nineteenth century to recognize that the realm of the immortals had expanded from the remembered dead to the transmitted and recorded dead.
— John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air, 139.

And then there's the recorded dead re-recorded in saecula saeculorum...

 

Gentle Reader...

Billy's Downtown Diner
Bethlehem, PA

When my wife Deb was associate editor for the exquisite (late) quarterly Books & Religion, editorial meetings would often concern the needs & desires of what they affectionately (and not without irony) called Our Reader. Unfortunately, this mythical creature, at least among her masters upstairs in Corporate, wasn't enough of an abstraction, and B & R tripped — or was pushed — over the bottom line into its grave.

I know it's different somehow with a blog, but my grasp of economics (which, if my Greek has not completely abandoned me for a more fertile frame in which to dwell, once meant something like "customs of the home," maybe even "Cider House Rules" without the "Cider" part) is insufficiently sophisticated to apply it to the case, and besides, the dang thing won't stand still, but keeps on transmogrifying, markets merging & splitting, devouring & excreting each other, and sometimes, like Neo inside Agent Smith, busting the matrix — i.e., "the way things are" — apart.

I've strayed from my original intent, Gentle Reader, which was to greet you after a long absence. I've brought along a few gifts, some no doubt of dubious value, as is often the case in such reunions, like the T-shirt your friends brought you upon their return from a vacation in Ireland, when what you really needed was for them to have taken you with them, and never come back.

Rambling again, sorry. Trouble with being my age is having so many damn stories to tell, & so little time to tell them in.

Which brings me round to my point at last. I'm going to perpetrate a subtle hoax — but then it's not a hoax if you're in on it, I guess — by backdating posts that actually I'm only loading in now, which will give the impression of an uninterrupted logorrhetic flow since my last "real" post of nearly two years ago. These false posts date (I *love* the ambiguity of "post" in this context, don't you?) correspond to jottings in my vademecum (if I'm using that term for my pocket notebook correctly — help me, some *REAL* classics scholar!) during my exile from the blogosphere, so I'm not lying about that.

But how can you trust me now? — short answer: you can't, and I invite you to apply that insight as widely as you wish.

What this means is that I'll be adding old stories as time allows, and they'll show up *under* this post, to preserve the appearance of chronological posting.
Enough already — except to say thank you for your patience, if you're not already long out the door, if you even exist, Gentle Reader. I hope you'll let me know if you do; I'd be grateful.

New life for an old kompyootr

Yesterday I set up a new computer in my apartment. It was paid for by my new employer, an online journal, for whom I'm the work-at-home managing editor. I've been on the job a couple months, and am just starting to feel like I know what I'm doing.

The new machine orphans the laptop that's been my main workspace for most of the millennium so far, and upon which I'm typing these words, through the soft rubber cover I put over the keyboard a long time back — a lesson learned from spilled coffee and flakes of paint falling from the old ceiling.

Naturally, I'll still use this battered re-conditioned pre-Intel Mac PowerBook for work, when I go on trips to conferences and weekends in New York City. But it's slow, one of its memory slots is hosed, and the screen's pretty cramped (though not as bad as the clamshell iBook, my first digital vademecum, fondly remembered as the ToiletSeat model or iCommode®).

Something occurred the other day that made me think of another way to use this ole thang. The details — "what really happened" — don't matter: it was just the most recent disillusionment, the kind that stops you dead in mid-stride, making traffic pile up behind you on the sidewalk. You know, when it dawns on you that things ain't what you thought they wuz?

You don't have to live very long upon this bank and shoal of time for this to happen more than once to you, though about the umpteenth iteration you have to start to wonder if you're *ever* gonna learn how to pay attention.

As with others at such moments, my first response was to wonder where I went wrong. That's what it feels like: being in the wrong, having fucked things up. And my natural reaction is to cast about for a way to fix that problem. But, as always, every solution is lame, or the cure's worse than the disease, or "all the river crossings/all the way to the sea//have been bombed" — as Galway Kinnell's exquisite new poem puts it — "and we must make our way by pure balance."

Easy for him to say. He's achieved apotheosis, he figured out years ago how to transmute his mistakes into Pure Poetry, to inspire and daunt the likes of scribblers like me.

The Buddhists are occasionally helpful in a circumstance like this, with their sad smile at mad humanity flailing about in the muck, sinking ever deeper into the morass of illusion. But it's hard to maintain that detached-though-compassionate attitude towards the human condition when a crushing deadline's bearing down on you, your feature writers are "having problems," and your server's gone down in Australia, where it's the middle of the night.

On the other hand, is it ever any different? That question encapsulates my insight du jour, and it's precisely no help, like saying, "Well, if you'd been watching where you were going, you wouldn't have stepped in front of that bus."

Not long ago, I awoke in the predawn dark, writhing to the jabber of my monkey brain haranguing and jeering at me, reciting the litany of all my failures and fuckups. I couldn't get awake enough to shake off this onslaught of self-denunciation, but I clearly wasn't going back to sleep any time soon, either. Then, into this turmoil, there dropped ten words from a quiet but commanding voice that shut up everything else: "Have a little respect, BBly. There's a soul stuggling here." In the ensuing silence, I heard the first cardinal of the morning give his wake-up call.

Hard to remember these moments of clarity — or rather, to reconstitute the immediate calm they produce. Dumping my possessions and cutting all ties with the world to go meditate in a cave in the mountains might enable me to persuade these epiphanies to come a little closer together, with less racing around and shrieking in between. Maybe not.

One thing is clear, however. I could use "a place apart" in my digital life where I can ponder such questions — including "Where did I go wrong?" — that isn't completely entangled in the wired world that sometimes appears to me to be like Ahab lashed to Moby-Dick, beckoning us all to follow him down.

Well, that's probably a bit operatic. Fact is, I love this little machine, not least because it's very comfortable to write upon, and I can set it up in front of my bedroom window, out of reach of the cable modem, and contemplate the here and now, even as it's passing away.

And because I'll be doing it for free, I can do it freely. Yeah. That can work.

Updike on the new authorship

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. As the author is gradually retired from his old responsibilities of confrontation and provocation, he has grown in importance as a kind of walking, talking, advertisement for the book — a much more pleasant and flattering duty, it may be, than composing the book in solitude. Authors, if I understand present trends, will soon be like surrogate birth mothers, rented wombs in which a seed implanted by high-powered consultants is allowed to ripen and, after nine months, be dropped squalling into the marketplace.
— John Updike, "The End of Authorship," New York Times, June 25, 2006.

Beckett on the afterlife

Samuel Beckett, on what it will be like in the afterlife: "We'll sit around talking about the good old days, when we wished we were dead." — Louis Menand, "Notable Quotables," in New Yorker, February 19 & 26, 2007.
 

There's no

There's no care except hunger
No favors but from an enemy
Nothing edible but a bale of hay.
No lookout but there's a man asleep
No clemency without crime
No safety but among the frightened
No good faith but a disbeliever's
Nor any cool heads but lovers.
— François Villon, from "Ballade," translated by Galway Kinnell

Winter

These are the desolate, dark weeks
When nature in its barrenness
Equals the stupidity of men.
— William Carlos Williams, cited by Lourie's Word of the Day, 2/11/07.

First snow day of this winter. Class cancelled, streets white.
Septentrional: pertaining to winter.
Thanks, Jeffie!
 

on Regular Information

Every check we write is drawn on exactly one bank, for precisely one amount, and each has exactly one check number. If we need to record checks, we don't need to worry about checks that are not drawn on a bank, or where "check number" is not a number, or where "amount" is a poem or a drawing.
— Mark Bernstein, The Tinderbox Way, 43.

This blog is made with Tinderbox. The book is more than useful in figuring out how to use a software program. It helps find useful ways to think about all the information we seem to have been put here to herd. I wish there weren't so many typos, but I love the calm reassuring voice, and the examples are — well, exemplary.
 

Of Love and Other Disasters

Of Love and Other Disasters

The punch-press operator from Flint
met the assembler from West Virginia
in a bar near the stadium. Neither
had anything in mind, so they conversed
about the upcoming baseball season
about which neither cared. We could
be a couple, he thought, but she was
all wrong, way too skinny. For years
he'd had an image of the way a woman
should look, and it wasn't her, it wasn't
anyone he'd ever known, certainly not
his ex-wife, who'd moved back south
to live with her high school sweetheart.
About killed him. I don't need that shit,
he almost said aloud, and then realized
she'd been talking to someone, maybe
to him, about how she couldn't get
her hands right, how the grease ate
so deeply into her skin it became
a part of her, and she put her hand,
palm up, on the bar and pointed
with her cigarette at the deep lines
the work had carved. "The life line,"
he said," which one is that?" "None,"
she said, and he noticed that her eyes
were hazel flecked with tiny spots
of gold, and then — embarrassed — looked
back at her hand, which seemed tiny
and delicate, the fingers yellowed
with calluses but slender and fine.
She took a paper napkin off the bar,
spit on it and told him to hold still
while she carefully lifted his glasses
up on his forehead, leaving him half
blind, and wiped something off
above his left cheekbone. "There,"
she said, lowering his glasses, "I
got it," and even with his glasses on
what she showed him was nothing
he could see. He thought, better
get out of here before it's too late, but
knew too late was what he wanted.
— Philip Levine, New Yorker, February 5, 2007

Leaving The Road

In the evening the murky shape of another coastal city, the cluster of tall buildings vaguely askew. He thought the iron armatures had softened in the heat and then reset again to leave the buildings standing out of true. The melted window glass hung frozen down the walls like icing on a cake. They went on. In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the black and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 229.

---

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate* patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes, a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
— The Road, 241. Last passage. The end.
* marked with close wavy lines. from medieval Latin vermicularis, from Latin vermiculus, diminuitive of vermis, worm.

The black shape of it

He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distand low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting in the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small penknife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 220.

Sitting over words

Riding the W train headed for South Ferry, on the adrack above the windows:

Sitting over words
very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
not far
like a night wind in the pines or like the sea in the dark
the echo of every thing that has ever
been spoken
still spinning its one syllable
between the earth and silence
— W.S. Merwin, Poetry in Motion, from Migration: New and Selected Poems, 2006.

Lost patterans

They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches drod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sister-world in the ancient dark beyond.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 152-3.

Where men cant live/with the last god

Where men cant live, gods fare no better.
— Old man in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, 145.

---

... to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing...
Ibid.

If only...

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath. Trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 9-10.

Make notes

Pure Balance

Wherever we are is unlikely.
Our few kisses — I don't know if
they're of goodbye or of
what — or if she knows either.

Neither do I understand why it's
exhilarating — as well as the other things it is —
to know one doesn't have a future,
or how much longer one won't have one.

Future tramples all prediction.
Hope loses hope. Clarity
turns out to be
an invisible form of sadness.

We look for a bridge to cross
to the other shore where our other
could be looking for us
but all the river crossings

all the way to the sea
have been bombed. We look for a tree —
touch it — touch
right through it — sometimes nowhere

is there anything to hitch oneself to,
and we must make our way by pure balance.
This is so and can't be helped
without doing damage to oneself.
— Galway Kinnell, Strong Is Your Hold, 64.

---

... Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
balone on white with fluorescent mustard?
... What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is blaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of a wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song...
— Ibid., from "Why Regret?", 65.

Make notes and make notes and make notes.
The music will appear.
 

Reservation

Bethlehem Diner

Overheard at breakfast:

Widows Club. Reservation for 14. 1 o'clock.

 

Practical use from a torn up life

A woman can always get some practical use from a torn-up life, Gabriel decided. She likes mending it and patching it, making sure the edges are straight. She spreads the last shred out and takes its measure: "What can I do with this remnant? How long does it need to last?" A man puts on his life ready-made. If it doesn't fit, he will try to exchange it for another. Only a fool of a man will try to adjust the sleeves or move the buttons: he doesn't know how.
— Mavis Gallant, Paris Stories, 183.

Xmas in Bedlam

On the corner of 1st Ave & W Market Sts, a yard hanging: 3 towel-headed snowpersons point their carrot-nosed faces at a star cross in the sky; so do their 5 sheep, who are not made of snow. The legend: Believe.
 

And we all shall be changed

• Machines can pool their resources, intelligence, and memories. Two machines or one million machines can join together and then become separate again. Multiple machines can do both at the same time: become one and separate simultaneously. Humans call this falling in love, but our biological ability to do this is fleeting and unreliable.
— Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 26, describing principles of the Singularity (which is Near).

---

• As virtual reality from within the nervous system becomes competitive with real reality in terms of resolution and believability, our experiences will increasingly take place in virtual environments.
— Ibid., 29.

---

• In virtual reality we can be a different person both physically and emotionally. In fact, other people (such as your romantic partner) will be able to select a different bocdy for you gthan you might select for yourself (and vice versa).
— Ibid., 29.

Let him decide

... Let him decide. Here are the three choices: ...
[] Tear it up.
[] Don't publish it but give me a copy.
[] OK, publish it, on the chance that somewhere someone survives of all those said to die miserably every day for lack of the small clarifications sometimes found in poems.
— Galway Kinnell, "It All Comes Back," Strong Is Your Hold, 7.

Aw, you guys...

Aw, you guys are the best friends a giant dufus could have.
— Homer, The Simpsons, Paul Bunyan episode.

Anything can be settled

Anything can be settled for a few days at a time, though not for longer.
— Mavis Gallant, "Irina," Paris Stories, 49.

Any command

Any command is a release, in a way.
— Mavis Gallant, "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street," Paris Stories, 23.

Quotes from Capt. Nemo

The Bush Administration reached hypocritical mass when Shrubya declared, "Heckuva job, Rummy."

---

Brandanistas, the LogoNazis...

---

The famous sputter-but: "But — But — But —!"

The Prophet on Knowledge

"Acquire knowledge," the prophet Muhammad commanded his followers. "... It guideth us to happiness; it sustaineth us in misery; it is an ornament among friends; and an armor against enemies."
— David Shenk, The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, 39.

Who are you, then?

Who are you, then?

A long time ago, he said, I wrote a story that included you. Now that story has grown to include me, and our meeting like this.

We each of us exists, he went on, in a web of stories, that extends through all the dimensions of our life. Not just space & time. Memory is also a dimension. So is what you would call imagination. And then there are dreams, visions, and — well, delusions. That's where we live.
 

For my final script...

Bethlehem Diner

For my final script I will be writing a story about a group [of] people that come together to survive the near end of the world. The world has become infected with a[n] extremelhy contagious virus that reanimates the dead, and turns them into violent cannibals.
— NCC scriptwriter's Final Script Summary

Damn! I hate when the stoodies get there ahead of me!
 

Grissom's wisdom

When you chase two rabbits, you lose 'em both.
— Grissom, on an early CSI.

DrDann's next gig

I've been upstate for a recording session at Mark Dann's Studio-in-the-Woods.

On my way home he calls to ask how the take-away CD sounds on the car stereo.

"Great!" I tell him. "You got a gig tonight?"

"Yeah," he says. "I'm playing in Kingston with the Tweety Birds."
 

Urinetown

Bethlehem Diner

Urinetown: Brecht lite? Blitztein lite? "Not a Happy Musical" — what does that mean, in present culture? Hilarious, sends up many another musical — to what end? Are authors utter skeptics, in [Toril] Moi's sense (see Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism)? Are we?
 

Chair Moves

Advanced Dermatology, Bethlehem

Chair Moves
Physicians Only
— taped to seat of stool Mr. W______ sits on for my examination.

Query: if I sit on it, will it move me? Or would I have to be a (sentimental?) physician?
 

Getting away

We all thought we could get away with everything. No one got away with anything.
— Diary of Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), Russian revolutionary, subject of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia, in New Yorker, October 30, 2006, 96.

Oh-oh, Eli...

My daughter Nelly was showing her boy Eli, who's one and a half, the wind blowing leaves around. Earlier she'd been reading the Disney version of Rockabye Baby, which shows the cradle coming down with a parachute, but Eli's smart enough to be concerned about the coming down part. So Nell opens the window & picks Eli up & shows him the wind, making the sound, pointing out the blowing leaves. Eli says, "Oh-oh, Babies!"
 

Halloween scene, Bethlehem

On Market at Liberty, a hanging flag, black background, Huge Orange crescent moon w/ face gazes indulgently on tiny witch on broomstick silhouetted against small orange disk of the full...?

If Mickey Mouse has a dog named Pluto, Goofy is a...?
 

Life

Life is a process of elimination.
 

Born again

If you were born again, do you have two bellybuttons?
— NY Thruway bumper sticker.

Eric Hoffer say...

I've been meaning to copy these out for weeks; the magazine itself is Harpers July 2005. From Eric Hoffer's notebooks:

Unused Talents Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people's assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream. — 1955.

---

The Academy Universities are an example of organizations dominated wholly by intellectuals; yet, outside pure science, they have not been an optimal milieu for the unfolding of creative talents. In neither art, music, literature, technology & social theory, nor planning have Universities figured as originators or as seedbeds of new talents and energies. — 1956.

I'm not sure this assertion holds true, 50 years later. Where else is there for new talents & energies to come from?

Still...

---

Schadenfreude The man of words feels better when the man of action comes to grief. There is not the least doubt that depressions have been good for the intellectual's soul. — 1957.

---

Underestimating To overestimate the originality of one's thoughts is perhaps a less serious defect than being unaware of their newness. There is a more pronounced lack of sensitivity in underestimating (our selves and others) than in overestimating. — 1957.

---

Lies that preview truth Why is it so hard to tell the truth? Because more often than not the truth is meager and stale. By lying we, as it were, reform the world — arrange things as we would like them to be. And often indeed the lie is a preview of a new truth.

Interlude: a single black loafer on the shoulder of Catasaqua Rd, right where it curves past Applebees — what's the story there?

---

Back to Eric:

Philosophy I could never figure out — or probably did not take the trouble to figure out — what the great philosophical problems are about. The momentous statements I come across are at best a storm in a teacup. There are quite a number of people who have a vested interest in the stuff, make a noble liviing out of it, and they conspire with one another to keep it alive. — 1977.

And from earlier (pages stuck together when I first opened the mag to start copying out):

Polemics give warmth Perhaps people throw thenselves into heated polemics to give content to their lives, to warm their hearts. What Luther said of hatred is true of all quarreling. There is nothing like a feud to make life seem full and interesting. — 1950.

---

Brooding I am more and more convinced that taking life over-seriously is a frivolous thing. There is an affected self-dramatizing in the brooding over one's prospects and destiny. The trifling attitude of Ecclesiastes is essentially sober and serious. It is in closer touch with the so-called eternal truths than are the most penetrating metaphysical probing and the most sensitive poetic insights. — 1952.

---

The desire for praise This food-and-shelter theory concerning man's efforts is without insight. Our most persistent and spectacular efforts are concerned not with the preservationof what we are but with the building up of an imaginary conception of ourselves in the opinion of others. The desire for praise is more imperative than the desire for food and shelter. — 1952.

---

Little to say If writing gives us satisfaction, we are likely to end up writing for definite periods each day when we have little to say. The hanging on to an empty form is almost natural since it is the form only that we can control and stage. There is, of course, also the unconscious assumption that once you stage the form, the content will come to nest in it of itself. All ritual is perhaps based on this assumption: you stage the gesture and words that go with fervor and faith and you assume that the latter will somehow materialize. — 1952.

Slow Mo/The more of them

He wears the eventlessness of his life very well.
— friend Rabbo re cat Elmo.

---

The more of them there are, the more they look alike.
— friend Nemo re These People.

More from Aegypt

Some additional morsels for the journey:

To what extent do we invent our rituals to frame a procession to the desired outcome?

---

... And hearing it all as it were from a third party, I saw, too, how the past fit together like the smooth and fitted stones of the Great Pyramid. You could not insert a knife blade between the blocks of recollection, no prying them apart to make a different narrative. The past was its own joined whole — a thing unto itself and complete. However, torn apart again, it was yet another fragmented mystery.
— Ba voice, in M.D. Coverley, Egypt: The Book of Going Forth By Day, Papyrus 20.

---

... What is hardest is the letting go. The realization that nothing counts, nothing can be saved up against the emptiness of the journey: it is always one time, one place, this night, this time.
— Ka voice, Ibid., Papyrus 25.

Nice to retrieve additional context for "the emptiness of the journey"...
 

Message in a cookie

You can't aim a duck to death.
— ourDeb's fortune tonight.

Without art

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
— G.B. Shaw, epigraph to Ch1 in Stephen Archer's Theatre: Its Art and Craft, 5/e.

Yeah, I guess. But let's not forget which side of the divide *teaching* art is on, especially to the Generation of Entitlement in a distribution course...
 

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And from...
 

The joys of hardcore sf

"All the inner planets are eggs," he continued, flattening Drea's interjection like a Hummer ironing out a motorbike.
— Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct/Nov 2006, 12.

Two-step

In the linear life we lead, as opposed to the multivalent life we dream and remember, whenever you take a step in the wrong direction, you have to take two more just to stay in the same place.
 

Grief

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. W e might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing." A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to "get through it," rise to the occasion, exhibit the "strength" that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day?We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, 188-189.

From The Great Fire

Isolation had made me arrogant, too. I wasn't prepared for the quality of thought in others.
— Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire, 124.

---

When we're indecisive, yes, the wishes of others gain.
— Ibid., 146.

---

There can be danger in supplying what people say they want...
— Ibid.,

---

"The illusory quiet of the world": small flaring hubbub of humanity, and the encompassing night. That ancient balance had tipped long since.
— Ibid., 147.

---

When a life goes off the rails, the casualties are many. One grows by turns patient, even saintly, and furiously resentful. These fluctuations occur in rapid succession or simultaneously, and the habit of abnegation loses its interest. Like others, I turn to my work, which occasionally palls.
— Ibid., 312.

One wants, of course, to simply copy out the whole thing.
 

Satisfaction

I should know better than to derive satisfaction from experience.
— J. Nathan Matias, in his blog Notebook of Sand, 27 Jul 2006.
 

Tragedy in life

...in life, tragedy is not one long scream.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, 417.

The universe

Why is the universe so complicated? Why is it so over our heads?
— Martin Amis, interviewed by Bill Moyers on NOW.

The only way you can write the truth

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Impossible, of course.

— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, 283.

Rooms

You live in your head.
You live in your heart.
You live in your gut.
You live in your genitals.

Each is a room — in an apartment, say — and each room communicates to each other room — you can go from any to any.

Living only in your head makes you crazy.
Living only in your heart makes you sad.
Living only in your gut makes you sick.
Living only in your genitals makes you disgusted.

Each can purify each. Any purges any.

A word

She stubs out her cigarette in the brown glass ashtray, then settles herself against him, ear to his chest. She likes to hear his voice this way, as if it begins not in his throat but in his body, like a hum or a growl, or like a voice speaking from deep underground. Like the blood moving through her own heart: a word, a word, a word.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, 112.

Some people.../Morning after

...some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, 2.

---

The sun was up, the room already too warm. Light filtered in through the net curtains, hanging suspended in the air, sediment in a pond. My head felt like a sack of pulp. Still in my nightgown, damp from some fright I'd pushed aside like foliage, I pulled myself up and out of my tangled bed, then forced myself through the usual dawn rituals — the ceremonies we perform to make ourselves look sane and acceptable to other people. The hair must be smoothed down after whatever apparitions made it stand on end during the night, the expression of staring disbelief washed from the eyes. The teeth brushed, such as they are. God knows what bones I'd been gnawing on in my sleep.
— Ibid., 35.

Prejudice

By definition a prejudice is a principle that its owner does not intend to examine. Which does not prove it wrong. And what a comforting thing it is.

— Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird, 156.

Aegypt delivered

Eight years ago, at a hypertext conference in my home town Pittsburgh, M.D. Coverley did a demo of her new work, Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day.

Last month she sent me a copy on CD, the artist's book version. I can't express my gratitude.

I've been reading it through and through for the past month, and haven't found the bottom yet, but want to share four quotes that struck me along the way:

We need, too, silence and watchfulness, attention to the ritual. Any hour of the night we could fall prey to the forces that seek to steal our hearts, make us walk upside down, leave us putrid beside the water's edge, separate us from what we love most. — Papyrus 12

---

One thing we do not know is our responsibility in the outcome. Does Osiris guarantee us safe passage? Or must we depend on the magic we have gathered ourselves? The ritual guarantees us nothing, perhaps, once we have embarked. — Papyrus 16

---

And what of the point, in the middle of the way, further than the middle of the way, in the shambles of the gods, when the journey back is too long to undertake, and we can only go forward? — Papyrus 22

---

Nothing can be saved up against the emptiness of the journey. — Papyrus 25

Street scene, Staten Island

The landscapers attack my neighbors house like a swarm of giant pissed-off bees.

Taken out of context...

Is this the hill? is this the kirk?
Is this mine own countree?
— Rime of the Antient Mariner

Sloganeering for Jesus

Sign out front of Epworth Methodist, on the way to Speech class:

SPIRITS LOW? COME IN FOR A FAITH LIFT!

There's gotta be a book in this...

People-watching at the Star City Diner

I didn't ask to be princess, but the crown fits.
— T-shirt on a 9-year-old a couple tables away at breakfast.

And we wonder why they hate our freedoms.

Street scene, Bethlehem

I heard the bawling baby approaching first, a young infant with a good set of lungs, then it passed beneath my deck overhanging Prospect Ave, at last revealed in a 3-wheel racing stroller pushed by its jogging father, who patted behind at a fair clip, hydrator sloshing at his hip, Borg phone clipped to his near ear, free hand leashed to 2 trotting spaniels.

My dear, the gear...

Max Weber's definition of government

Government is an organization claiming a monopoly on the licit first use of force in a specified geographic region.
— paraphrased in Eric S. Raymond's "Why I Am an Anarchist"

"Boys" on Verse Daily

It's a small thing, but good news is always welcome. My poem "Boys," recently published in Runes: Signals, was featured April 2 on the poetry site Verse Daily.

Thanks to CB ('Lyn) Follett & Susan Terris, co-editors of RUNES, for the heads-up — and always for their encouragement & enthusiasm.

Life at work

Life at work is like a tree full of monkeys, all on different limbs at different levels.

Some monkeys are climbing up, some down.

The monkeys on top look down and see a tree full of smiling faces.

The monkeys on the bottom look up and see nothing but assholes.

— sign on the door of 19 Old Main, Kutztown U

Pilgrim's Progress

I was driven out of my native country by a dreadful sound that was in mine ears, to wit, that unavoidable destruction did attend me, if I abode in that place where I was.
— Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress

Heuristic

Staten Island

Across the street, a pregnant mother & her 2-year-old daughter (son? the hair's short & silky) make their slow way up the sidewalk in front of Roberta's house, each pushing a fold-up stroller, one child-sized, one doll-sized. The mom's wearing dark blue overalls w/ white polka dots cross-tied over her shoulders, the toddler a pink hooded sweatshirt over pink jeans — her stroller's pink, too, just like her mother's is dark blue [mom also wears a red back pack just under her longish brown pony tail]. Right at Roberta's gate there's a raised seam in the sidewalk & the little one gets stuck, but the mom just stops & waits, murmuring encouragement until the little one works it out. Then they're on their way.

Family Happiness

On our first date, I told my wife
I was a lesbian trapped in the body of a man.
Everybody says that now, of course,
on TV and radio, alternativev media outlets,
tattoos and bumper stickers, but this was long ago, when
none but the brave (who deserve the fair)
would come up with somethiong like that.
She smiled the pleased and goofy smile that flowers in her big eyes,
and I thought I had her.
Looking back now, though,
I can see her appraisal of me rounding to completeness.
I can hear her cognition firing.
She knew it. She knew even then
the truth it has cost me aeons to acquire,
climbing and climbing the broken stairs:
I'm a man trapped in the body of a man.
I clutch the smooth walls and see through his eyes
the oil fires and containment units,
the huge clawed gantries strung out on the twilit polar horizon.
Through his alloyed ears, I hear
the objects of his scorn, his compassion, his hatred, his love
crying out and crying out.
Half my arms are his arms.
Half my face is welded to his face.
The other half mouths his clumsy ironies.
"Life is war," he says.
"Tragic," he says. "Tragic."
The simulacra are marching everywhere,
and deep in the caves the chimera are breathing.
— Vijay Seshadri, in New Yorker August 29, 2005, 72.

This is no time to tire!

"Up on your feet! This is no time to tire!"
My Master cried. "The man who lies asleep
Will never waken fame, and his desire

and all his life drift past him like a dream,
and the traces of his memory fade from time
like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream.

Now, therefore, rise. Control your breath, and call
upon the strength of soul that wins all battles
unless it sink in the gross body's fall.

There is a longer ladder yet to climb:
this much is not enough. If you understand me,
show that you mean to profit from your time."

— Virgil to Dante, Inferno XXIV 46-57

We fabulists live two lives at once

It is said that we fabulists live two lives at once. First we live as others do: seeking to feed and clothe ourselves, earn the respect and affection of our fellows, fly from danger, entertain and satiate ourselves of the things of this world. But then, too, we live a second life, pawing through the moments of the first, even as they happen, like a market-woman of the bazaar sifting trash for treasures. Every agony we endure, we also hold to the light with great excitement, expecting it will be of use; every simple joy, we regard with a critical eye, wondering how it could be changed, honed, tightened, to fit inside a fable's walls.
— Benjamin Rosenbaum, "Notes to A Discourse on the Nature of Causality," fictionwise.com, 53. An Alternate History, like The Difference Engine.

Good listener

Spudfest tale:

People accuse me of not being a good listener, but I just know what they're going to say.
— some Brahmin my friend Bruce used to work for.

Shreds & Patches Gather No Moss

About a month ago, I responded to a call in the Chronicle of Higher Education for submissions by "graduate students, faculty members, and administrators who will be on the job market in the 2005-6 academic year and would be interested in keeping a diary of their job search."

Yesterday I got the reject slip, so there's no need to keep it under wraps any longer. Its original title was "A Thing of Shreds & Patches," with the alternative title "Gathering No Moss." Submittants were permitted to use a pseudonym to protect their tenuous hold on current employment; I chose Nestor Didaskalos, for reasons which the following may make clear.

Without further ado, have at it.

A Thing of Shreds and Patches
(alternate title: Gathering No Moss)

by Nestor Didaskalos

I've been an irregular in academe for over thirty years. The first fifteen were spent in tenure-track positions that didn't pan out; since then I've lived the gypsy's life of perpetual adjunct instructor and part-time administrator, at institutions ranging from large urban universities to a tiny rural community college. For much of that time, I've been more or less content with my lot, because in the beginning I told myself that I was only doing this college stuff to support my habit of writing (poetry, plays, fiction, hypertext), and then I found I had the knack for it and enjoyed the work, and eventually got good enough to think I could maybe make a living as a professor, and so I have, after a fashion.

But recently the grasshopper's perspective on getting and spending has grown pretty tired, not to mention nearly suicidal in today's economy, and I've begun to adopt the ant's industrious and systematic approach. In short, admittedly late in the game, I find myself in the market for a full-time job.

Like most academic nomads, I've had to turn my hand to many different tasks along the way -- student counseling, curriculum development, program directing, publications, communication design, faculty training, tech support, online course development, and -- oh yeah, teaching: dramatic literature and theatre history, writing of all kinds (from stage plays to electron lit), all manner of interdisciplinary studies, and, most recently, in an ironic plot twist no fictioneer could ever get away with, speech communication, the only course I ever failed in college (well, it *was* 1968...).

At the moment I'm going after positions in instructional technology, in part because I love playing with the toys, but also because I really like helping people figure out how things work -- it's the master motif in every one of my lectures, for example -- and one of the most challenging problems in most of our lives today is persuading all our devices to cooperate so we can get our work done. My dream job would be one in which I'd often get the chance to say, Sure, I can help you with that.

I just got back from a two-day conference of people who hold down such jobs as I'm applying for, and a jolly time it was indeed. Some of them teach, some write books, some run stables of other techies, some are the only one of their kind at the school they serve. But all are finding new ways to look at the world through technology, and, in a practical way, explore the media environment that claims more and more of our time and attention day by day. After the plenaries and workshops on each day of the conference, we all repaired to the local watering hole to tell tall tales, share war stories, and occasionally find a solution to a problem -- conceptual, professional, even personal.

With ant-like focus on my objective, I did the networking thing, trying not to act desperate while also letting folks know I was in the market for a job like theirs. I hate this part.

In later installments of this diary, I'll no doubt relate much of the saga whose ever-unfolding plot has landed me in my present uncertain situation, but I believe I'll dedicate this episode to an account of the first lesson I learned about having an academic career, maybe any career: things change, and you need to find out whether you're willing to change with them, or should follow your bliss somewhere else.

A dramarama in college, I'd gone to grad school to make plays, not write papers on literary theory or research theatre history, though of course I was resigned to having to jump some academic hurdles to get my MFA, at that time a terminal degree. This I did without stealing too much time from writing my scripts.

If there was a job *market* when I first started working in higher ed, I didn't know about it. My first offer came about almost by accident: I'd dropped in to the Assistant Dean's office at the first school I visited -- with no application, no inquiry, no resume in hand, and no idea if there was even an opening there -- and it just happened that the fire escape from her office led right across the roof to the fire escape of the office that a brand new drama department was temporarily inhabiting. The Dean herself walked me across to make sure I didn't get lost. It was a different world then.

This brand new drama department had a killer business plan. There already existed a conservatory-type theatre program at the university, with a student-faculty ratio of about five to one. The new department took in the rejects from this conservatory program and farmed them out to professional training schools throughout the city, then brokered the rest of their BFA requirements through the university's Arts and Sciences college. Technically, no instructors were actually needed here, though the Dean at least tried to make it look like a regular department, by letting our chairman teach a course or two, and by hiring me.

My first year, we had maybe 125 students, all freshmen and sophomores (the conservatory program had only 50 in all four years). By the time I lost a tenure run-off ten years later (to a colleague I'd helped bring on board, of course), the enrollment was nearly 1000; today it's close to 1500, and the number of faculty (I was #2, after the chair) is nosing into three digits.

When I later read accounts of life in start-up software companies in the early days of the dot-com bubble, I was immediately in familiar territory: the long hours, the staggering amount of work, the certainty that we were changing the world, the unquestioned loyalty towards each other, the overall sense of *mission* -- it felt like the Wild West, and we were building the New Jerusalem.

Sounds terribly self-important, I know, but only from a perspective outside that heady, adrenaline-drenched state of mind that makes boot-strapping any something-from-nothing enterprise possible.The rush beats the effect of any drug you can buy, because it comes from inside, and when the trip's over, you've got something to show for it, something lasting, something others can pick up and take even further.

Which is exactly what happened, duh. It wasn't really the Wild West, it was a university; we didn't build the New Jersalem, but a viable department in a school of that university. Sooner or later we had to stop acting like cowboys and start behaving like academics, to quit pulling new programs out of the ether and begin making the ones we'd already invented work better.

It turned out that I wasn't so good at this second-stage endeavor, perhaps because it was too safe, too normative -- too much like a small town, actually -- but also because my relative position in the new power structure was much more constrained: I couldn't just make up a course I felt like teaching, it had to be formally proposed, then passed on by curriculum committees, and finally approved by the Dean, a process that could take a year or more. (By contrast, the so-called "feeder school" where I now earn my crust turns such proposals around in a matter of months, sometimes weeks.)

I won't say I rejoiced in being denied tenure and promotion, but it did eventually present another opportunity at frontier-farming, as it were, and over and over again since that time I've gravitated toward situations where some pioneer has opened up a patch of wilderness that now needs a town built on it, and once again, to mix metaphors, I can turn my hand to whatever's needed to get wheels under the wagon so it can go.

The world of instructional technology has been around long enough that at many schools the transition from frontier town to provincial burg is well underway. At such venues I probably won't even get an interview, which is fine with me: I'd probably hate it pretty quick. Besides, in a few years they'll likely be blindsided by a new gizmo some eleven-year-old is right this moment dreaming up in his or her basement, whilst I sit here sweating the page breaks on my latest CV.

On the other hand, I learned a hell of a lot about the local terrain at that conference last week. We'll see what the human resourcers and officer types make of my checkered credentials.

Media Ecology Unplugged

Last weekend the 6th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association was held at the Lincoln Center Campus of Fordham University, with the theme The Biases of Media. The MEA was founded in 2000 (it may have been earlier; the first convention was in June 2000) as an academic association "dedicated to promoting the study, research, criticism, and application of media ecology in educational, industry, political, civic, social, cultural, and artistic contexts, and the open exchange of ideas, information, and research among the Association’s members and the larger community" -- as it says on the media-ecology{dot}org home page. Among its founders was the late Neil Postman, who also supplied this definition: "Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival."

The Moses of the MEA is Marshall McLuhan, who first proposed that media be regarded as an environment in order to understand its nature, its workings, and its effect upon our lives, and the study of environments is ecology. (Sorry, ye grammaticall prescriptivistes, but in this register the singular of media is mediA, not mediUM. The old definition of medium as means of information transport has been replaced in current usage by the term technology, as in print technology, broadcast technology, online technology. Media, as an environment, is a singular thing. Get over it.)

I think as much as his ideas and formulations, it is McLuhan's *sensibility* that informs the ethos of the MEA, or rather of its constituent members and fellow travelers. He was a maverick in the academic world, regarded by many colleagues and critics as a buffoon at worst and a paradoxer at best; his seminal publications were not academic papers and books but pop-art manifestos, broadsides, and talk-show appearances; his deepest immediate influence was on students in his classes, some of whom became apostles who spread the gospel so effectively that only 25 years after his death, there now exists a kind of church, the Media Ecology Association.

I won't pursue the early-church analogy here (I'm working on a paper), but only say that the enthusiasm, openness, sense of mission, and above all feeling of fellowship among the membership in attendance made for a heady weekend indeed.

The Convention actually sprawled across 5 days, Wednesday through Sunday, and comprised some 250 demos, panels, and presentations, with topics ranging from Bringing General Semantics-Based Media Literacy to Younger People to The Wiring of Bhutan: A Test Case for Media Ecology in the Non-Western World. There was, perhaps predictably, a session dedicated to blogging, entitled rather cryptically Media Bias and the Emerging Online Communities. The entire program is somewat awkwardly encased in a 20-page .pdf at the site if you want to browse through and see what you missed.

If you do check it out, you'll find on page 13 of 20 an item labeled Performance: Media Ecology Unplugged, presented by Bill Bly -- Fordham University and John McDaid -- New York University. And therein lies the tale of this entry.

I knew nothing of media ecology and had only heard of McLuhan (well, and seen him in Annie Hall) when John, who was then (as now) a Ph.D candidate in media ecology, proposed we do a joint presentation at the 1st annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association, at which he was presenting a paper and also I think sitting on a panel. Hardly a traditional academic, I'd only presented my first conference paper the previous fall, and so was appalled, until he said we should play our guitars and sing, the Simon and Garfunkel (or more likely, I thought, the Smothers Brothers) of media ecology. We did pretty well, on the applause meter at least, and have continued to lighten the load if not the path of the proceedings every year since (except the last, when neither of us could make it to Rochester). This may make the MEA the only academic organization to have a house band; if so, I'm not surprised -- it's that kinda gang.

After that first performance, John and I were sufficiently pumped that we decided to make a CD, Media Ecology Unplugged, which won the 2002 John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in the Field of Media Ecology. We haven't sold enough copies to recoup recording expenses, but then I've been in charge of marketing, so that's no surprise. Nevertheless, you can sample our wares at infomonger{dot}com, and if you'd like a hand-burned copy with liner art output from my Epson ColorPhoto 820, drop me an E at bbly{at}infomonger{dot}com.

Let me just say a word of appreciation for Lance Strate, brilliant media theorist and historian, co-founder and president of MEA, former chair of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham (he hired me), fellow grad student with John at the New School, and all-around mensch. Without his encouragement (some might say indulgence) I wouldn't be here, nor have this wondrous tale to tell. Lance, you give me reason to live.

Don't take down that book

Don't take down that book.
Pick up a musical instrument.
— Rumi

What we could have been

If Britain's generals had been more enterprising, if the French had failed to supply vital military and financial assistance, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and the rest would be known to us not as political & philosophical giants but as reckless (and hanged) losers, supporting players in a single act of Britain's imperial drama. We would all be Canadians now, with lower prescription drug costs and an inordinate fondness for winter sports.
— Barry Gewen, "Forget the Founding Fathers," New York Times Book Review, June 6, 2005, p.30.

Pismo

My friend Emil has translated the entry about his talk/reading at the Bowery Poetry Club a couple weeks ago, and now I'm at published in Russian at Pismo.

It's a wonderful world...

Mighty Haakon

I spend at least 8 hours a week on the road, scurrying from one freelance job to another: it's a gypsy's life. I ping-pong between Staten Island, NY, where I have a house, and Bethlehem, PA, where I have an apartment, with the occasional ricochet to Bucks County PA and Morristown NJ. And -- I almost forgot -- the Bronx, where I teach a class in Hypertext Theory and Practice at Fordham one night a week.

At highway speed through most of New Jersey, that's close to 500 miles a week, and over the 5 years I've been performing this boogie, I've put some serious mileage on Mighty Haakon the WonderVolvo, a dark blue 1991 240 sedan, maintained by our doughty neighbors Phil and Lee at Island Vo Vo Repair, 3 blocks away at 68 Hannah St. If you drive a Volvo and live anywhere within 100 miles of Staten Island, Island Vo Vo is the place to take your Big Swede next time for a periodical.

The name of the enterprise was Island Volvo for many years, until there was some kind of palace coup at Volvo Corporate, and the suits showed up on Phil's doorstep demanding he change the name, since he wasn't an official dealership. So Phil took out his stepladder, removed the "L" from the sign above the garage doors, and the suits had nothing more to say. There's a great photograph of him in front of the place, cradling the L in his arm, deadpanning the whole thing, as is his way.



I'm not sure how I got into this, but 6 years ago, there were only 60,000 miles on Mighty Haakon, only 50,000 more than when we bought him, used, in 1991. In another couple weeks or so, he'll turn 240,000. When I told my friend John McDaid this, he said, "That's as far as the moon." No other friend of mine would think of that.

When I thanked Phil for making it possible for me to drive to the moon, he said, "Which way you headed now?"

Mazel tov, tovarisch Emil!

Three years back, during a too-short residency at the Vermont Studio Center, I became friends with Emil Draitser, a writer and professor of Russian literature at Hunter College. In 1974 (the year I started teaching) Emil was "blacklisted by the Soviet literary establishment for a satirical attack on one of its members, [and] immigrated to the U.S. where he continued his writing career," according to the bio on his website.

Last night I attended a talk and reading Emil gave at the Bowery Poetry Club, "Searching for Jewish Roots: An Evening of Russian-American Literature," sponsored by the Russian American Cultural Center. The occasion is the publication of Emil's new book, Kto ty takoi (Who Are You?), "a memoir of his childhood during the most perilous time of post-WWII Soviet history, and of the pressure of growing up Jewish in an anti-Semitic and totalitarian society." Here's the press release for the reading (Emil doesn't look quite so out of focus in person).

The talk was conducted in English, the reading in Russian. Emil told of coming to realize that a whole dimension of his childhood had somehow become lost to him: he was being interviewed about growing up Jewish in post-war Stalinist Russia, when his voice started to break, even though he wasn't particularly upset at that moment, but it felt, he said, "as if I was swallowing tears." His interlocutor recognized what was happening, saying that many of the people interviewed simply broke down sobbing, unexpectedly, once they started talking about their lives.

Arthur Miller describes a moment in the Witch Museum of Salem MA in 1951 or so, where he'd gone to do some research (for a new play that would become The Crucible), when a family of tourists came in, asking to see the nails -- i.e., those reportedly found in the flesh of the little girls who said they had been "witched" by one of their elders. He said, "I have an overwhelming urge to tell these people what the nails mean. It is the urge to write." (My paraphrase.)

Emil felt the same urge, only it was himself he needed to tell this story to -- and he was afraid he couldn't remember what happened, after so much time. But he found, he said, that we remember everything: memories are like index cards -- they might get pushed back into corners or buried under others, but all you have to do is take one away and then another, and eventually it all comes back.

The novel-in-progress is about Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, and the part Emil read is set in Rome, where he spent a month and a half in the Russian community there while his papers were being processed for his eventual "repatriation" to America. Unfortunately, he told us before starting to read, "I write my academic books in English, because they come from the head. But my fiction comes from the heart, and so I write in Russian." He apologized to those of us who wouldn't know what he was saying, but I loved watching my friend work the audience -- who found the story hilarious -- without being encumbered by the meaning of his words.

I left much edified -- about memory, about writing, about life.

Two Kinds of People...

As everyone knows, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don't.

Being one of the first kind of people has certain advantages: for example, you're able to account for things some people do that is otherwise inexplicable, such as re-electing George W. Bush. If you believe there's only one kind of people in the world, you'd have to think that 51% of them had become psychotic, or had been replaced by eidolai that came out of giant bean-pods in the garage, or had suffered some other incredible mishap that, if you took it seriously, would make you doubt your own grip on reality.

When my daughter Nelly started to ask all those questions that start with W, my favorite was "Daddy, what makes them do that?" -- because it was the only one I felt I could honestly get away with answering, "I really don't know. I've never been able to figure that one out." I didn't have the heart to tell her there are two kinds of people in the world, at least until she was old enough to have some compassion, understanding, and respect for such poor benighted souls following their leader (whoever he happened to be) into the darkness: they can't help themselves, sweetie-heart, because they are, well, different from us.

At a political luncheon on that fatal election day last fall, I heard a dear friend and fellow traveler describe the dichotomy thus: "What we (liberals) want is a big tent, and for everybody to be able to get into the process; all they (the conservatives) want is 51%, and they're willing to do anything to get it."

It may seem at first glance that my friend is with me, believing that there are two kinds of people -- liberals and conservatives, in this formulation -- liberals recognizing and respecting difference, hence their open-door policy; while conservatives only see things one way -- their way.

But in fact it's the other way round: liberals believe that all people are created equal, and therefore are entitled to every protection the law can provide; conservatives recognize clearly that there are two kinds of people -- the good ones (them) and the evil spawn of the devil (us) who must be exterminated by any means necessary.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.
-- William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming (1920).

Well, maybe each group has both kind of people in it, which might account for Jim Wallis's encouraging book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It as well as Dennis Miller's going over to the Dark Side.

Bernard Shaw, in his seminal modernist rant The Quintessence of Ibsenism, divvies up the world's population into Idealists and Realists (well, actually there are also the Philistines, but they count for little, since they're able to get along pretty much with things as they are). It would be tempting to think, at least among the combatants strutting and fretting their hour upon politco-cultural stage today, that the liberals are the realists, trying to get government to mirror the world as it is -- i.e., full of all different kinds of folk, including not only fat rich straight white ones, but also people of all different colors, races, creeds, genders, sexual orientations, and body weight -- while the conservatives are the idealists, trying to force everybody to force everybody to actually be all the same -- i.e., aligned with the Lord and imbued with Fambly Vayooze.

Again, at least to this two-kinder, that's backwards. Liberals believe that government can actually evolve (with help, admittedly) into the Peacable Kingdom, whereas conservatives *know* that the only thing government is really good at is preventing some people from doing what they want (albeit, sometimes, to the benefit of all concerned). Who was it who brought the term realpolitik into our national discourse? Wasn't it Henry the K (may the vultures roost on his shoulders)?

I think the only way to make any sense of this controversy is to get Biblical on its ass.

And the Lord God said..., I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
-- Genesis 3:14-15, King James Version

That pretty much sums it up for me, how about you? The thought has occurred that this might be an evolutionary thing, possibly even DNA-related (as was clearly the case between the woman and the serpent), and that the survivor in the culture wars was going to be the one with the passionate intensity, irrespective of position on the issues.

Does being a big-tentist preclude being a realist? I sure hope not, but Team Liberal better find itself a firebrand somewhere and soon, cuz night is falling fast.

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
-- Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach (1867).

Capturing the Unicorn

Short follow-up to the previous post on Heritage.

After sufficient gentle nagging from my darling webmaven Deb, I finally got around to reading a most remarkable article in The New Yorker (print version) from about a month back, Richard Preston's "Capturing the Unicorn: How two mathematicians came to the aid of the Met."

In 1998, the Cloisters—the museum of medieval art in upper Manhattan—began a renovation of the room where the seven tapestries known as “The Hunt of the Unicorn” hang.

Googling turned up the unadorned text version of the article in the magazine's archives as well as a lovely excerpt with grafix among the Braden Files.

Of course the tapestries had to come down, and it seemed a good opportunity to clean them and also to create digitized images of them for archival purposes. Turned out the tapestries had ideas of their own...

If you're still nearby

...If you're still nearby, if somewhere in this darkness
there's a place where your spirit
resonates with the shallow sound waves
a solitary voice can stir alone at night
in the currents of a high-ceilinged room:
then hear me: Help me. You see, we slip back,
without kknowing it, from our advance,
into something we didn't intend: where
we can become caught up, as in a dream,
and where we could die without waking.
No one went further. It can happen to any of us
who raise our blood to an extended work,
that we can't hold it at that level,
and it falls of its own weight, worthless.
For somewhere an old enmity exists
between our life and the great works we do.
So that I may have insight into it and say it: help me.
-- Margaret Atwood, from Two Headed Poems