Voices in the Line

When the telephone first came to our upcountry farm in Kula,
there was only one wire. The numbers were a digit different,

but it was the same line. When anybody's rang, ours rang
in the kitchen, and so rang the receivers in every other house.
No matter what somebody said, anybody could be listening,

and everybody knew it, so nobody ever said anything important
or personal on the phone. Phones were public, like a restroom

or a library is public. If the words were private, they were taken
outside or penned. Nobody ever called anybody for no reason,

and conversations were short. Before the telephone, we lived
alone where we couldn't even see the neighbors' lights at night,
but the wires shrunk the world. No longer was there anywhere

you knew anybody you couldn't call anymore. So we called.
Whenever we picked up the phone, there were voices in the line.

-- Eric Paul Shaffer, in Rattle 30, Winter 2008.

I know this guy's story. I was a kid when this happened to me, living in one of the first of a five-house plan in what used to be somebody's front forty, our yard still an open wound in the earth, the view still clear down to the creek and the two-lane up the opposite bank.

Mrs. Wilson had the switchboard on a table in her dining room -- I saw it once when I went to play with her son Tad. She was in the kitchen, I think, and Tad showed me how it worked: pull this plug, stick it in this hole, crank the dial for numbers in the county seat 10 miles away, then you asked another operator for a hookup to Pittsburgh, where my grandparents lived.

The phone hung on the wall opposite our back door, in the short passageway between the dining room and kitchen -- a shiny black box with a hook but no dial, no white disk with number in its center. I'd sit there in a chair dragged from the kitchen table, holding the hook down with my free hand, talking into the heavy handset to pretend friends.

It was a party line, shared by six families, and the phone rang maybe once or twice a day; you listened to the pattern of rings to see if it was for you. Ours was long, short-short, long; the Clearys' up the hill was long, short, long-long. Mrs. Wilson did the rings by hand, pushing a spring switch on the panel next to the dial. I once asked her -- she was my Sunday School teacher that year -- who worked the switchboard when she was asleep. "Why, if somebody calls, I just get up and answer it. What do you think?" But what happens when you go on vacation? She just looked at me.

Our parents were our now-kids' age then, maybe younger; those of us watching our contemporaries roll off the table in ones and twos these days are beginning to realize there's a whole world evaporating atom by atom that will only be retrievable in little vignettes like Eric Paul Shaffer's poem -- and if I don't print out the blog for my descendants to find moldering in the bottom of a linen trunk (remember those?), it's likely this wispy commentary will vanish into the digital dark age like the rest of the artifacts we're impetuously entrusting to the cloud.

It's not just the world of quaint devices and their picturesque usage that's disappearing, but a world of relations to each other, as Shaffer's poem conjures with such lovely simplicity. Indirectly, he also evokes the world of silence and distance that his grandparents watched disappear, perhaps with the same nostalgia that he himself seems to be feeling now, and which may have supplied some motivation for writing the poem in the first place.

That silence and distance was not a gap in our relations -- as it appeared to technologists bent on improving "communication" -- it was a room, and each of us had one: in which to rest, to which to retreat, from which to sally forth when it was necessary to communicate with one another. There was peace in that room -- or maybe it just seems so to those of us too young to remember such a condition of things -- where tranquility was attainable in a way all but impossible in the noisy world today.

The heedlessness of technological progress is a dusty old trope -- think of the story of O say the Tower of Babel, or Icarus -- that doesn't much edify. The alarums about dwindling privacy among our young, who don't seem to know what the alarumists are even talking about, is probably in the same class of prudish or plain cranky ranting against change for ranting's (not change's) sake.

That doesn't make the prudes and ranters wrong. Here's what Kafka thought about "improving" communication:

Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it's no longer any help, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the wireless. The spirits won't starve, but we will perish.
-- Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenká, epigraph to John Durham Peters's Speaking into the Air.

Flashback I

To the tune of "We're Havin' a Heat Wave..."

I'm havin' a flashback,
A terrible flashback...

Yesterday, believe it or not, I went Christmas shopping for my wife. Over the past few years, we've been having a serious motivation problem with The Holidaze — the decorating, the doing the shopping, the wrapping the presents, the getting everything shipped in time, then the scheduling the visits, the making the calls, the whole mishegaas. Now my wife's a fantastic decorator, and when it comes to online shopping, she could be a consultant — hm, maybe I'll mention that... — but I'm a failure at all these things, which doesn't help in the spirit of the season department. Long story short, we don't shop for each other until after we've (read she's) discharged our obligations in the friends & family department.

So yesterday I'm in Macy's, which I haven't visited in the better part of a year, grimly cruising the fragrance counters for my darling's favorite (I gotta say I like it too), when I feel my neck start to tighten up, my shoulders lift in a protective hunch, and my ears prick up as if I'm about to get conked from behind. I whirl around, but all I can see are three very tired looking but well-dressed ladies chatting across the aisle between two make-up stations, one of them sitting on the floor surrounded by boxes she's unpacking.

I'm so relieved I blurt out something totally stupid: "Make me up!" — my arms extended, throwing myself on their mercy.

They all look rather startled, but one of them sees that it's a joke — not likely a portly gent in a baseball cap & a ratty sweater is there for a facial — and plays along. "Where've you been?" she asks. "We haven't had you in the chair for ages!"

I can't keep it up, of course, so I say something lame like "Sorry, long day" and ask for the fragrance brand my wife reminded me last week that she really likes. By now the other two gals are cackling, perhaps at the image of my stubbly face under their hands. But in the end they do have mercy on me and direct me to the proper counter, right by the entrance to the rest of the mall.

And there, after a relatively painless shopping experience, the creepy feeling comes over me again. I look out into the mall itself: the boutique eateries, the gussied-up dummies up against the glass, the weird counterpoint of too-loud, too-happy music that straddles the entrance to every store — and the terror rises exponentially. And I realize... I'm having a flashback.

Just before the holidays a year ago, I began what I now jokingly call my Misadventures in Retail. It was an odd year, 2007. At the beginning of it I went to work for a bunch of Aussies, editing an online arts journal that they were trying to take global, but my part of it was downsized six months later, and I got to be unemployed for the next six months while I scrambled to find something to do next.

Then I saw a posting for a job at a computer sales & service center in New York, and I thought — hell, I like helping people, I love computers (at least mine), and I need a job: what could possibly go wrong?

You never want to ask that question. It's like being disappointed in the results of the 2000 election but thinking, O well, how bad can it be? My friend Nemo did just that, and eight years later is still marveling at the humongous enormity of that particular failure of imagination.

I was hired as an intaker in the service department — in effect, a triage nurse at a computer hospital. I stood behind a horseshoe counter studded with cheap laptops and styrofoam pads, and did my best to counsel, console, and commiserate with folk who all too often had literally just lost their minds: it worked fine yesterday — a little slow, but it's been doing that, and now all I get is this black screen with a bunch of gibberish in different languages...

In chess, intakers would be pawns, the front line that absorbs the enemy attack. And some days it felt like that — people get really upset and irrational when you tell them that all their family photos are lost because the digital key broke off in the lock, or that their senior project for a bachelor's degree will cost them $1200 to retrieve (though it's free if we can't do it), or that their financial records for the past ten years are now totally toast.

It was harrowing, and exhausting, but I really enjoyed it, once I got the hang of the impenetrable intake forms and learned which technicians to bring the poor broken lambs to (and which techs it was best to cross the street to avoid). Sometimes there were miracles, sometimes disasters, sometimes things got worse the longer they stayed. But most of the time I could help, if only to help my customers learn the only real computer lesson there is: BACK EVERYTHING UP IN THREE DIFFERENT PLACES.

Trouble was, I was making more money on unemployment, and the two-hour commute (in the dead of winter) was just killing these old bones. So when a similar position opened up closer to home, I took it, even though it involved a 63-mile drive — not a great idea, given my tendency to act like the Avenger of Evil on the road (there's a reason for that: I am the Avenger of Evil).

And it's that gig that still gives me terrible flashbacks like the one I had yesterday at the Mall...

(to be continued...)
 

Samizdat

My first and favorite experience in samizdat was The Pick-Pocket's Packet, published by the W.P.A.O.P.P. (Western Pennsylvania Association of Organized Pick-Pockets), Rich Kenny, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief.

It was eighth grade, that liminal year which in other municipalities would have been the last year of grammar school, but in those days, in our proto-burb just outside the orbit of metro Pittsburgh, the only school was Peters Twp. Jr.-Sr. High, still attached to McMurray Elementary ("grade school") where I first embarked on my journey towards Upper Education. [See photo.]

Over the summer, more than half of our male colleagues had vaulted into puberty, and now towered over us, deep-voiced and hairy, suddenly dazed by the presence of lumpy girls whom only months before they hadn't even been able to see.

It was a point of pride with shrimps like us (Rich & I were always in the front row in group shots) that we could travel faster in the halls between class periods than any upperclassperson, whose pockets sat at just about shoulder height on us as we zoomed in and out of clumps of flirtiing hulks, and boosting a wallet was pathetically easy.

But the idea was far more intoxicating than the actual experience, which inevitably involved having to give the dang thing back, with the social awkwardness and occasional contusion that resulted. So Rich, a boy of ingenuity and grit that I could only envy (in chorus once he socked a notorious bully in the jaw when the jerk blocked his way), started writing up our adventures, with the usual dilations, on pages of his yellow pencil tablet, which he ruled off into columns, drawing "wire photos" and ads around which he poured breathless accounts of our exploits, announcements of upcoming events, minutes of executive board meetings, and subtle satire of the school administration.

I wrote the gossip column, which I didn't do very well, and so didn't do very often, but I helped copy and distribute issues to the dwindling number of dweebs like us amongst our classmates. Eventually, I think, we were shut down by humorless teachers, who I now believe took the confiscated copies home and had a good yock with their families.

The next year we both crossed the Rubicon into adolescence, and somehow drifted apart. I saw Rich again over a decade ago at some anniversary of our graduating class, and though I recall that he hadn't changed much (except for the mustache), I don't remember anything we said, not even if The Pick-Pocket's Packet came up or not.

I can't say my writing career began there -- I had at least ten more years of goofing off to get out of my system -- but it was a great wonder to me to watch a "piece" take shape under Rich's hand, in #2 pencil on cheap yellow paper, and I think it was then I realized dimly that somehow everything I read had been written by someone in a manner not unlike this, whatever happened to it afterward in its journey towards print that landed it, however briefly, before my eyes.

And somewhere, sometime, I said to myself: I want to do that.

[Originally appeared in Ye Antient Blogge, 14March 2002.]
 

blue knit gloves on the window sill...

I want to say to the father at the bus stop every morning fall winter spring with his now two crazy boys yelling running stomping staggering nonstop right up the bus steps when it finally comes that there is a pair of boy-sized blue knit gloves lying on the window sill next to the door of the house on the corner where they wait that must well might belong to one of his sons who probably lost them some mornings back in his wiggling & ramming around with his brother boiling off all that excess energy that'll get imperfectly bottled & contained some tens of minutes later when he spills out of the bus into the hive where it's their job to effect such translations but without his gloves that some thoughtful passerby must have found & put on the window sill in case their owner or owner's parent more likely came looking for in all the places they could've got lost that would certainly include the bus stop right at the top of the list [for anybody who went to look] if anybody thought about it but probably they just bought new ones or had a spare pair because this wasn't the first time & boys are always losing things that don't mean anything to them except that somebody wants them to wear them but will sooner or later get in the way or just disappear the way things do. But they haven't disappeared they're right there on the window sill bright blue the color of nothing else but a little boy's gloves so they'll stick out in the visual field when you go lookng for them on the ground in the woods on the hall floor among the boots [to be continued...?]
 

Snow falls in the rising light...

... bringing it back down from the opaque dome just beyond the trees' reach, dropping it on them, the sidewalk, the tops of cars patient as cows lined up to wait out the first storm of the year. The squirrel is pissed, but the crows flap on, kidding & laughing, towards their sunrise staff meeting in the oaks around the old folks' home, where they'll decide, among other things, what to do about the weekend. The squirrel just won't shut about it, but what else can he do? The light's all over everything now, burying it, there's no hiding from anything.
 

Dispersit superbos mente cordis sui

This past weekend the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, of which I am a whisky tenor, performed the Vivaldi Gloria and Bach's Magnificat (the one in D). Both are magnificent, dancing works to sing, and I love the Magnificat especially, it being the first major work of his that I performed in my half century of choristing.

The tenor aria in that work, "Deposuit," is one of the most exciting, testosterone-fired solos in the repertoire, with its heroic text, "He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek." One o' these days, I'm gonna get up the nerve to try it in public.

But the best alternative for a choral tenor is the "Fecit potentiam," with its extended fireworks in the opening lines, which then spreads its contagious enthusiasm to the other sections of the choir. Again the text is not what you'd call reassuring: "He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts."

It's that last line that has been haunting me in the past weeks: at first, it was part of the refrain of my rejoicing at the "decisive victory" (love the sound of that!) my team enjoyed in last month's elections (along with the well-known parody of "Fascination" — It was schadenfreude, I know...).

Some weeks on, the giddiness has evaporated as abyss beneath abyss opens its maw our under economy, the days get shorter, the moon gets closer, the weather weirder, and somehow the idea that this one reversal in the political climate of my mother country will heal the world of hurt we're in right now seems remote.

Back in September, I read James Woods's bracing review of my idol Marilynne Robinson's new novel Home in the New Yorker, in which she diagnoses our peculiar malady: "Americans never think of themselves as sharing fully in the human condition, and therefore beset as all humankind is beset." For good or ill, that imagining of our hearts is in for a bumpy ride, and I doubt if negativity will pull us through.

My only consolation these days is poetry. As Octavio Paz reminds us in his magisterial book of poetics, The Bow and the Lyre, "Poetry changes, but it does not decay. Societies decay." Last week, as I read the chapter on Rhythm, I came across this prescient passage (the book was published in 1973):

[T]he real tradition of the United States, as is manifested by Whitman, was the future: the free society of comrades, the democratic new Jerusalem. The United States has not lost a past; it has lost its future. The great historical plan of that nation's founders was thwarted by the financial monopolies, imperialism, the cult of action of action's sake, the abhorrence of ideas. [67]

Puts things in perspective: sure sounds like the place I'm still living in. Maybe we can change (yes we can), but in the meantime, I'm signing up for Hugh McLeod's less Romantic take on the subject, "You are either a poet or a corpse."
 

Something to land on

I thump the spider on the outside of my sliding screen from the inside with my figernail, worried about finding her there, worried she'll get in. But, whereas an insect or slug would either fly away or fall, she just pops right back to the exact same spot as if held there by a strong rubber band, which, functionally speaking, she is, and grapples more deeply into the seam where the screen tucks in, like a — well, like a grappling hook, which she rather resembles, and I desist, knowing a repitition will injure her, perhaps fatally, if in fact I haven't done this already.

I wonder, as I walk to the kitchen to refill my coffee, what she's doing on my screen, high up like that, at eye level, then realize it's more her screen than mine — I merely rent it, while for her it's no different from the tree branch or the bush, from which she hangs her gorgeous deadly web. Our two worlds only intersect by accident: we humans manufacture objects and properties that we pretend to agree we possess; for the bugs & other tiny critters that live among us, these structures — including ourselves — are just something to land on.
 

The fawn

Out of the background of joggers, speed walkers,
strollers, the saunterers with their leash-straining
pets, she gallops straight at me down the middle
of the street, so tall she can't be a dog, but too
small for a horse, stick legs drumming, black toes
clicking on the asphalt, just after I've pulled around
the corner, before I've picked up any speed; I jerk
my foot off the gas but can't find the brake, inch over
to the side, nearly taking the side mirror off
the parked cars at the curb
as she hurtles past, black eyes staring, wide,
unseeing, or in any case unmarking, a smear of
bright red on her chin makes me cry, "She's been hit!"
to no one who can hear
the fawn clatters by, nothing but running, running
for her life, for her death
 

The sun slips

The sun slips, demure yet sure, out from hiding behind the maple that overhangs the playground where the workmen pound & shout. Behind me, upon an aural bed of late August crickets, a single locust echoes: sliding in, then blazing.
 

Eli3

Today is the birthday of my grandson, Elijah Bly Arougheti. He's 3.

In his honor, I've prepared my first podcast.

To play it in your browser (and sing along):

Elijah3.mp3

For the multimedia version, head on over to:

Elijah3 {at} dot-Mac

Australia Project: Will of the Cockroach

Last week I had the pleasure of seeing some new plays in Manhattan, part of the Australia Project, a production of the Production Company, an Australian-American alliance, which put on eleven new plays over the past three weekends at Chashama 217, on East 42nd St between Third and Second Aves.

Stupidly, I'd written the address down as 217 *West* 42nd St, believing that this was the same Chashama Theatre in which I'd seen my friend Lan Tran's performance piece How to Unravel Your Family some years back, and so emerged into the flashing lights of the Times crawler only to find the building I sought boarded up, the only door to the construction site guarded by a screaming woman who attacked anyone who came near her. You gotta love Times Square.

Thinking quickly, I whipped out my cellphone and dialed the author of the play I'd come into town to see, Alexandra Collier, an Australian lass I'd met (by phone only) in the heady days of Arts Hub US, for which she'd written three wonderful features. Ally gave me the proper address of the theatre, and said she was sure I could sneak in, but at that point I'd have to cross half the island at its widest point, so we agreed to meet at intermission; fortunately, her play went on last of the four in that evening's offering.

No one looking like Ally's AH contributor photo appeared before the second act started, so I sat in the back alone to watch Continuing Occupation by Van Badham, a savage latter-day David-Rabe-type satirical comedy with a dotty-to-the-max Mom; Jenni, the cool narrator daughter, home for her 21st birthday party, and her nasty violent incestuous necrophiliac brother, who works for Halliburton Iraq and brings barbecued baby limbs to the party for everyone to eat. Fun for the whole family.

Ally's play, Will of the Cockroach, was less phantasmagorical than Continuing Occupation, but had its surreal dimension as well. A young Ozzie pair, D and Susie — he a writer, she a dancer (I think) as well as D's support and stay — try to cope with no money in a vermin-infested dump in Brooklyn. They're on a road trip from Oz, which has tested their relationship, but they're still very much in love, not to mention lust. The point of divergence is living in NYC, which Susie finds exhilarating (if forgivably exasperating) because Americans are always looking FORWARD, on their way, the past doesn't determine them, they can make themselves over — something it seems she's burning to do. But D is rooted in his homeland — this is what the road trip has taught him — he even has an imaginary channel on the map on which he writes his stories that leads straight through the earth to the beach where he longs to be, and every once in a while he gets a whiff of that clean ocean air that he's suffocating without.

Into this interesting mix of emotions erupts the Cockroach, a hefty guy in a brown leather coat, wearing a mask with antennae and extra appendages under his arms (the costume was very poor theatre, but, had the lighting been better, was otherwise perfect). Both D & Susie are horrified and disgusted by him, but Susie is also fascinated by his staying power: he's a survivor, and that's what she wants to be; a survivor, in fact, is what she is.

Predictably, Cockroach comes between D and Susie, though he's only symbolic of what's ultimately going to pull them apart: she wants to stay, he needs to go back home. So even though D manages to kill Cockroach off, Susie gets the last word: she repeats Cockroach's refrain, I'll be here until the end.

Much more engaging than its predecessor, and the acting, given the dismal circumstances of the production, was quite good: Tim Major (from Brisbane) was folorn as you could want as D; Mary Jane Gibson (from Newfoundland) sexy and spirited as Susie; and Joel Israel (from NYC) a stolid but winning Cockroach. Were I directing, with unlimited budget, I'd have done something creepier with the lighting and choreography, but I thought May Adrales did a servceable job in letting the play tell its own story.

Ally portrayed the relationship between D and Susie with wise compassion and a sure hand — unhappily, they seemed headed for a break-up even without the Cockroach's intervention, but that development itself was also deftly handled.

If I had a quibble, it would be that Cockroach's wisdom about surviving in New York was rather abstract, rather than exhibiting the native New Yorker's absolute and detailed mastery of the subject. On the other hand, in his terms, New York's a fairly recent development on the planet, which is his bailiwick, not just NYC today.

In short, I was charmed, and look forward to seeing this play in a more robust production, which it definitely deserves.

As it happened, Ally was delayed, and snuck in herself just before her play started, sitting next to me, unwittingly for both of us. After the curtain call, we got to chat very briefly, but she was mobbed by admirers, and I really had to fly in order to catch my boat, which in the event I missed by six minutes, stranding me for another hour until the next one. But the ferry terminal's always a rich environment for people-watching, not to mention having Roberto Bolaño's fine story "The Insufferable Gaucho" to read in the New Yorker. So the minutes flew. And I got home in one piece, my main goal of the day.
 

My Mother and the Snake

I had seen the snake before.
I had watched the copperhead unwind itself
from the gut and leather bindings
of a pair of snowshoes that hung on the wall
in my father's woodshop, though what
it was doing there, I do not know. Another time,
it slithered away from the woodpile,
what at first seemed a nest of dead leaves
unfolding in one smooth rope of molasses
and honey. Its scales sparkled in the sun
as it paused to look back at me, the topaz
eyes so unlike anything I'd ever looked into
it froze me with its cool enchantment,
like a girl in a fairy tale who forgets
who she is, a small bell at the back
of my head chiming poison, poison,
until I turned and ran.

I don't know where the snake came from,
or how it found its way to my parent's farm,
just that my mother feared it, as she feard
for us kids that summer, running half-wild
in field and forest, as cancer spread its slow
venom from her one breast to the other.
I feared it too, but abstractly,
its danger coiled like the secret
of my mother's illness in some
dark crevice of family.

Until the afternoon the blunt,
wedge-shaped head rose,
hissing from the grass
where the sprinkler spun
gold over our bodies, and my mother
whirled in out of nowhere with the ax
from the wood pile, chopping
and chopping — my gentle mother
whom I'd seen save a choking chick,
turn a birthing lamb, murse baby rabbits
the dogs brought in with droppers of warm milk —
hacking and hacking at it.

Until the writhing, bronze ribbon lay still
and she pulled us close, tears
running down her face, and sent us
to bring stones to pile on the body,
while the sprinkler twirled on,
splashing us with water from our own well,
washing the snake's blood away.
As if it were not the beginning of the end
of a world, as if what I saw written
on my mother's face was not the story
of just how many ways there are
to be exiled from Eden.

— Allison Townsend, in River Styx 74, 5-6.

Brave New World at 75

As physics has developed, it has deprived us step by step of what we thought we knew concerning the intimate nature of the physical world. Color and sound, light and shade, form and texture, belong no longer to that external nature that the Ionians sought as the bride of their devotion. All these things have been transferred from the beloved to the lover, and the beloved has become a skeleton of rattling bones, cold and dreadful, but perhaps a mere phantasm. The poor physicists, appalled at the desert that their formulae have revealed, call upon God to give them comfort, but God must share the ghostliness of his creation.
— Bertrand Russell, in The Scientific Outlook (1931), writing about Huxley's Brave New World 75 years ago, cited in Caitrin nicol's "Brave New World at 75"in [link] New Atlantis: a Journal of Technology and Society, Spring 2007.

---

Unlike the other great dystopias, Huxley's World State, though totalitarian in its orthodoxy, is ostensibly ordered on the wants of the goverened rather than the governors. Threats are rarely used or needed. Rule by bread and circuses has proved more potent than force — and more pernicious, precisely because every means of control is a perversion of what people really want. The only people with any capacity for dissatisfaction are a handful of Alphas, who are as unable to articulate their objection as Russell is. It is difficult to reject the sinister when by slight distortion it masquerades as the sublime. Why feeling should be able to distinguish these things while reason cannot is an interesting question, one which could be left forever unsettled by tinkering, through biotechnology or psychological control, with what Huxley (in a later foreword to the book) called "the natural forms and expressions of life itself."
— Caitrin Nicol, ibid.

---

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
— Aristotle, from Quote of the Day

On becoming kipple

He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, natually, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in the stricken living room alone with the lungless, all penetrating, masterful world-silence.
— Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 447-8, LOA edition.

Sunset Blvd blazed...

Sunset Boulevard blazed, empty, rinsed in sunshine, the stray cars like bugs streaming in the footprint of a vast lifted rock.
— Jonathan Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet, 124.

It takes a long time...

It takes a long time for a mouse to realize he's in a trap, but, once he does, something inside him never stops shaking.
— Laurie Anderson, quoted in New Yorker Rock & Pop listings, for May 21, 2007, 10.

Shall I tell you about the land where people hurry across?

It was a strange land,
With many roads and few destinations.
There were signs everywhere
Instructing people to do this
Prohibiting people from doing that,
But mostly people did as they pleased,
And the only rules that were enforced
Were the one protecting those people in power,
The people who broke the rules most often.

In the blink of an eye,
The soft, irregular shapes of the land
Became hard and regular
And the people swarmed over them
At incredible speeds.
No one remembered the voice of the land;
They had forgotten it had one at all.

But the land cannot forget.
Everywhere are sad traces of its history.
Confused and astonished at how quickly it is dying
The land grieves and waits.

What does it wait for?
For someone to listen, to recognize its voice,
To hear its story.
But it also waits for its eventual rebirth.
It will happen, sooner or later.
The question is,
Will we be there to see it?

— Sharif Ezzat, from Like Stars in a clear night sky, in Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, October 2006. See also his site, www.youwerehere.com.

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.