Compendium Hermetica

Change of Address

2003-08-07T22:13:00.000-04:00

You've probably noticed posts here have slowed down. In fact, I've moved. Hopefully this also anticipates a physical change of address as well. Please change bookmarks, favorites, etc to reflect the new site, here. More on the other move once details are more certain.

Happy Birthday

2003-07-14T23:10:00.000-04:00

Happy Birthday

One year ago, I picked up this habbit of writing things down here, rather than in one of a number of journals that I keep. See my first post here. Competely accidentally, my blogging habbit shares a birthday with one of the sites that lead me down this primrose path, the ever swell Metafilter.

New material...

2003-07-08T23:33:00.000-04:00

New Material...

available here.

Testing...1...2...3...Check

2003-07-07T23:38:00.000-04:00

An alternative version of the previous post, and other material, may be found...here. Enjoy, review, comment, etc.

Labor of Love

2003-07-07T19:52:00.000-04:00

Okay. I have a problem. A book problem. I buy them when I shouldn't. I procure them, new or used, when I already have 5 on my nightstand awaiting my attention. I will even buy a second paperback edition of certain books just to have a copy to loan, or even for aesthetic reasons. I judge books by their covers.

But those who know me know that I can be…fickle, even picky. So I do not pick up books lightly. Even those five long neglected books on my nightstand will be read. By bringing them into my home, I have entered into a tacit agreement with their author, I will read this, or at least give you two or three hundred pages in which to catch my eye. Ultimately, it is that experience that occurs between me and the book that determines where it will reside in that hidden library – the one that exists in the same time and place as your tangible shelves and stacks, but takes as its ordering principle the essential value of the books. Books I enjoy, books that edify me in some way, take precedence and ascend to a higher cell in my own personal library of Babylon.

I have had some experience of such structures. One of my first post college jobs had me selling books at a large independent book store in Denver. I remember it fondly, though without money at all. I like to say that I started in the non-profit world by working in a bookstore first. Booksellers know the truth of this.

Add to this, my own tendency to scribble (scribble, scribble,..eh, Mr. Gibbon?), and you have the components for a fetish – an alloy of desire out of proportion to the base material fixed in its heart. And as we all know about desire, it can flatten, and reduce its object so that it has no past, no existence beyond its circumscribed role in your little passion play. With books, as with people, this means that we lose sight of much of the reality of books. We consume them alone, miraculously left to right and down, and we imagine their creation as an equally solitary affair.

So it was with great pleasure that I accepted, as part of my job, a chance to tour a facility for one of the largest publishers in the world. Hidden among the rolling hills of central Maryland, the location does not announce itself, and even does a good job of masking its dimensions. I arrived slightly early, perusing the new titles on display in the posh lobby, a rectangular, black marble affair with a large receptionist desk guarding the entrance into the offices. So I did not mind waiting, which I did for a few minutes before my appointment.

Contact met, meeting had, agreements made, we dispatched our business quickly, and we got down to the part of the meeting that I anticipated most: the tour. As you have guessed, a large publisher would not maintain its editorial offices in semi-rural Maryland. This facility serves as the main warehouse and distribution point for all its imprints, save for the children’s books which ship from the heartland – somewhere outside of Indianapolis. No New Yorker editors or reporters lunch here. No “talent” stalks the halls throwing tantrums after a 3 martini lunch. Or rather more realistically, there is not the fear and the hunger you see in the meager resources and the high stakes of the editorial circles. Here, books are objects, and the action they receive is motion.

The tour starts with a walk through the floor where completed orders containing combinations of titles in varying amounts ultimately leave the building on freight trucks bound for individual book stores. Your hear the noise first, or a general din of claxons, warning honks from incredibly fast, light forklifts, personal tractors, and some strangely hybrid cherry-picker that is somewhat related to an amusement park ride, or at least the safety harness suggests that. The sounds pile up on one another, loosing distinction until you come upon an individual noise’s source, or it streaks up behind you.

This single room is about a Quarter-mile square. I think. Its actual bound disappear in grey and brown shadows in three directions. A score of trucks have backed up to the docks. They have ample room to accommodate another score.

We walk past the docks. Since my time at the bookstorehas left we with question on how this side of the business works, I ask how fourteen miles of conveyer (actual fact) gets a single copy of a deep backlist title to an independent bookstore (among many other questions). My contact cannot answer that for me, but is great company for the tour. The next stop: the obligatory Death Star Room.

The Death Star room occupies a seemingly indeterminate amount of space. Its dimensions and function have created an interesting lighting situation. It has none. Perhaps “Death Star” references the wrong George Lucas picture – think instead of an updated version of the facility into which a faceless government employee wheeled the ark from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Instead of providing light for the entire expanse, completely filled with enormous shelves that form rows of inventoried grids that stretch out of sight (possibly not be all that far, true). The fork lifts for this room run on rails between two banks of shelves. Controlled from a stationary console at the end of each rail, the fork lifts may also move along a vertical rail as well. The forklift also had its own lights and video camera, allowing the driver to watch the progress of the lift and its tines. The Cartesian contraption could turn the twelve pallet-story shelves into its own crossword puzzle, pulling down millions of letters at time rather than as single character per box.

After the impressive atmospherics of the Death Star room, we took a quarter mile walk through the shorter stacks. When I say shorter, I mean 8 palette stories high. ON either side ran enormous boxes of books with such easily recognizable brands as “Grisham – Rainmaker” and absurd quantities. All the while, I continue asking questions about the process through which single books from the mid and backlists get to any bookstore, let along the independents. All the while, employees race along on upright forklifts that look a lot like heavy duty, futuristic Segways. As we continue past the mechanical repair facilities (the size of a small aircraft hanger), we come to the intersection of the rivers of conveyer belt that flow through the entire complex.

A two story cage, stretched out of sight ahead of me and to my left. The belts flowed in and out of both levels, eventually running down the right hand side (cardinal directions being meaningless, also, without graph paper to create the D&D type floor map). Within the cage resided shelves so densely packed with books that they resembled the deepest interior stacks of a large research library. Except that all the books looked new, were new. Crisp back and pages and beautiful trade covers, scratched a little because of the pressure of their neighbors.

In the cage, scores of employees, of pairs of hands, filled order sheets for individual bookstores. In the case where a store or chain orders fewer than multiple palettes of books, quantities arrive at the cage. Workers receive boxes with printed orders for the book store in question – a pick list. Then employees pick those books like any other crop. They stock each order with the requested books and send it down the line. They move quickly and work despite the maddening hum of the workers that moved up and down the stacks struck me as bees in a hive. We continued on.

Just off the cage, we saw the Print on Demand Facility. Here, books that once ran through the old presses but have fallen out of even the backlist have a second chance at life. Once a book no longer appears in Books In Print, it becomes much harder to get. Usually you have to rely on chance at the used book store (like this excellent store in Portland), or a foreign imprint, or chance. Our culture publishes such a volume of material that only a small part of it can stay in print at any given time. But at this publisher’s operation, books that they no longer retain quantities of may exist digitally. They store all text and associated art digitally and, when an order for one of their out of print books arrives, they can simply and quickly print a single copy. Workers then stack the pages, print the cover, and bind the book. It looks exactly like a standard trade paperback book, better than the mass market editions, and much better than the mimeographed pages of Books on Demand.

This room, in which typesetter labored on Macs, setting up digital copies of books, while workers actually bound books outside, contained a lot of noise. I wondered how the typesetters did it actually. But still I envied all of them their jobs. Standing in the room brought back a memory of working behind the scenes at the book store. An co-worker whose ideas I can frankly describe as “zany” once suggested using this exact technology (once marketed directly to booksellers) in order to break off relationships with the big publishers who favored the large chain book stores. By going directly to the authors, we could end the relationship whereby the manufacturer set the price rather than the retailer.

I didn’t think the idea had any traction when she first mentioned it years ago, and I see why it more properly resided at the publisher level at any rate. The volume that a large retail book store encounters demands certain efficiencies. These preclude taking 5 minutes to print a copy of a book. While that is extraordinarily fast for a single copy of a single book, it cannot match the speed of a large press. When confronted by the demands of the latest Harry Potter book, this system would still be printing pre-orders for this title alone. Meanwhile stock in everything else drops while a single title monopolizes resources.

Seeing the process gave me hope for the particular, and also drove home that the particular demands more work. All is right and proper with that.

After that, we continued the tour, meeting a woman about to attend her granddaughter’s high school graduation. She had raised her grandchildren after their mother left them to her care (an increasingly common story). The previous evening, she and the principal of her school had surprised her daughter by announcing that, in addition to her numerous awards, she had won a full scholarship to Washington & Lee University. She would be the first person in her family to go to college. Her grandmother beamed. I mention it because her story, her happiness made me so happy.

We walked the long tunnel that connected the two complexes that composed this campus. Walking from end to end, you would traverse 1.5 miles. I did not know the distance that a circuit around the perimeter would take you. I later saw aerial photos of the complex. They don’t do it justice. As we wound our way through the paths of a building similar in size and function to the first, I saw a series of palettes under wraps. They stood wrapped tightly in clear plastic with guards standing by watching them carefully. Turns out that these bundles contained the audio version of the new J.K. Rowling book. Since my visit preceded the release date, they remained here under guard until booksellers could legally sell them. No amount of chiding could allow me to look at the packages, let alone listen to its contents.

We completed the loop, returning to the area where completely assembled orders as well as large quantities of single titles left for bookstores and large distributors. We chatted in her office again. I received many complimentary books (I had forgotten about the free books – the galleys, the publisher copies, the preview kits, etc.).

I learned that over 900 people work at this facility. They handle the books, literally, that we read in our solitude. That we imagine springing out of some Prospero’s mind – equally solitary save for his muse, his Arial. But the reality is this: hundreds of thousands of people work in a business long said to verge on collapse. People who study literature closely sometimes loose sight of an important aspect: book as industrial artifact. Yes the tome in your hand represents an individual’s or groups creative process(es). It represents an editor’s temperament and fickle tastes. It also represents the physical labor of thousands of individuals doing some pretty unromantic work.

So this account really reads like “What I did over Summer Vacation,” by Brian, grade 24. But my visit does help me view these objects differently. Suddenly, I no longer speak directly back at the author (though that remains the most important conversation), but a whole host of would be participants enters the room, even if the remain mute. They speak their words through their work.

2003-07-05T14:20:00.000-04:00

Speaking in Tongues

A short essay on the high jacking of Southern Baptists by fundamentalists, and how this creates some of the most unusual alliances in politics today - between Christian Conservatives and robber barons, and with a president who speaks a hidden shibboleth to one of the fastest growing religious and political organizations on earth. Via the ever post-full Metafilter.

2003-06-24T06:40:00.000-04:00

Working the Postal Grift as Art

Looking at the postal art of Michael Thompson and Michael Hernandez de Luna, I think of Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49. In that novel, a secret society communicated through and propogated itself via a parrallel and completely underground postal system. It also happened to feature one of the most extended references to Thomas Middleton's Revenger's Tragedy I've ever read.

Regardless, postal art enlists craft and audacity to perpetrate a fraud when carried to its ultimate end: using art to convey a message through a larger system - in this case, the USPS. While they must rely on the high level of dissatisfaction among postal workers, their art, in its intent and subject matter, is very subversive

2003-06-13T21:41:00.000-04:00

Astonishing

Beautiful ~~panoramic photos~~ panoramas of the Burning Man event. It strikes me as a medium that can help approximate, but never capture, the sense of space in places like the San Luis Valley, and Fair Play, Colorado.

2003-06-10T21:13:00.000-04:00

Summer Reading

While working on a longer piece about the insides of a ... well, you'll see... but until that's complete, something to take to the beach.

While reading Jason Goodwin's Lords of the Horizons, I found myself displeased with the book as a history. It jumped about far too much, provided footnotes either as either cryptic addenda, or completely tangential trivia, while never providing citations, or attributions (though a bibliography is included, as well as a piece overstated by being called a "gazetteer). I was on the verge of even putting the book down, as I realized that I had read a great deal and could recite only the most general conclusions and the most bizarre trivia from my time spent (perhaps more indicative of me than the book itself).

So I asked myself why I was having trouble holding this book as firmly in my mind as something much denser. I then reviewed the bits that I had rereading large chunks of the text. This allowed me to identify my mistake.

The prose is often quite good. But good prose doesn't necessarily make a good history. It can make a good history a great history. In this case, it can make a spotty history a charming summer read. It was a category mistake I made - it's not an informative history, but a well written set of anecdotes ladled over a timeline and given great narrative impulse by a good writer. It tends toward overview and ellision, but Mr. Goodwin's prose gallops along like the Gazis to whom he so frequently alludes. In fact, it's a great travelogue for an empire whose soil that no one has walked in 80 years. That's certainly worth picking up.

2003-05-26T11:46:00.000-04:00

Pax Americana

Here we are at the center of things. It has rained for more about a week now. A brief respite on Monday allowed us a glimpse of the sun. I also saw the sun on Saturday afternoon while riding the metro from D.C. to the park-and-ride where our car waited out the day. The sun was a flat orange disk seen through five days worth of cloud cover and years worth of air pollution. It seemed a million miles away. It ornamented the gray sky, evocative of something sad - for some reason, I thought of sunsets in tropical climes. This triggered the thoughts of empire - of the imperial citizen visiting the periphery. Then I realized that just a half-an-hour earlier, I had been standing at the center of the American Imperium - the Mall. On one side, the Capitol, empty since the Parliament of Whores had recessed until after the Memorial Day weekend. On the other, stands the Washington monument. The Smithsonian behind me, and the National Gallery before me.

Being in there, in the center of Washington, the District of Columbia, you are reminded of the effects that ideas have on the actual. The layout of the city enacts an enlightenment idea of how a people should order its capital city. The result, in the twenty-first century is a regrettable degree of gridlock and confusion. It enacted many Enlightenment ideas made manifest in its most spectacular aspect, its buildings, and its being: government - an executive mansion not nearly as spectacular as (and literally tangential to) the legislature. Separate offices, not palaces. Individuals and not dynasties. And yes, streets patterned after and named for French allies. But today, It occurs to me then, the difficult love of ideas that we represent, and at best, pursue. We have now an administration that has added an idea, Terrorism, to the official enemies list. This is not the first idea, just one of the broadest, and the meanest war to be declared.

When you declare war in idea, you assume a kind of authorship for that idea, as your actions then start constructing that idea. By creating Total (now Terrorist) Information Awareness, you demarcate Terrorism as occurring in the transactions and social networks of all citizens. By changing Immigration and Naturalization to a subset of concerns handled by Homeland Security, it becomes not an agent of justice, humane consideration, discernment, and diversity (in all fairness, if it was ever that), it instead becomes a filter that looks for what is most like us. It will now stop Immigration and de-nature those who do come to this country.

So the administration draws its bounds with each action, with each invasion. We are drawing the magic circle around something. But what will materialize when we are through? If the current direction is any indication, an amalgamated chimera of our fears: a multi-headed hydra of monstrosity, otherness, and the fear that so pervades our society.

But they will never finish the circle. Their lines of force and differentiation will spiral outward until they encompass more and more people who deviate for their ideal citizen: the consumer so invested with debt and enamored of enacting identity through purchase that they fear the collapse of a system that puts their lives on a collision course with the rest of the world. Already the FBI maintains various categories of terrorist including "Environmental Extremist," "Militia Activist" and "Religious Fundamentalist." These labels can be applied to Greenpeace, the NRA, and the Society of Friends respectively. These labels can and will slide to cover those who are politically engaged and oppose the current administration. Will peace activists be far behind?

With the social networks analysis, combined with the Bio-metrics and recognition activities suggested by DARPA's recent report to Congress on the TIA, Orwellian nightmares begin to take tangible shape in a more literal way than ever before. Under the guise of state supported capitalism, we see the rise of an entirely new fascism. A collusion of industry, media (especially the media, the "left wing media" as consolidated under three companies), and conservative politicians is creating a form of the modern state that looks depressingly medieval: the multinational oligarchy. IN the recent past, this was the aristocracy. Now we have an emerging group not to the manor born, but ideologues who have been busily erecting that shining city on the hill for some thirty years, and are preparing to lay the last bricks in the city's walls.

That city, regrettably, is the city that I have just visited. This city that enacts ideas, that conjures the unreal into the actual, and makes war on the evanescent, this city under construction, this city under siege from within.

2003-05-25T11:04:00.000-04:00

Lorem Ipsum sit amat...

The default text of the electronic age (though this page alleges a much longer pedigree), Lorem Ipsum appears wherever you need text for text's sake. Now you can make your own (without the task of transcription) with the lipsum generator.

2003-05-15T07:39:00.000-04:00

Falling

We will see stories end
Through the monocular vision of
The television.
Far-sight has replaced foresight
Fetish of image,
Now totem and mantra
The image is a talisman that we watch in fascination.

So it seems like years ago - people push down their bags
Push down their minds.
See how little the world has changed - we are not worried.
We have resumed shopping - the little things that make life normal
We fo-cus
On little things to make life normal.
These are the things least likely to be found
Broken or not working -
The morning cup of coffee from the coffee chain,
The electric seat warmers in the car
The new car,
The SUV,
The new raise from the old boss
You are suddenly happy to have.
You delete that ultimatum
From the file - the one
Where you demand
A raise, demand
Another week off -
Demand the company parking spot because you landed
The fake
Fat
Account.

Suddenly grateful for an ordinary misery.
You shut up.
Yours is not the extraordinary misery
Of choosing a ninety story freefall -
Seen 300 million times through one eye.
Yours is quiet,
Solitary and normal.
So you go on, grateful.
Some events make us content with crimes and pain
Because the event is catastrophe and we have to make room
To make sense of it - while pain is chronic - fear is chronic.
Sadness seems like it will not end and you surprise yourself when you say you want to die - some day you won't surprise yourself because it will be how the anxiety and worry started - the small nagging that you could put down with small things.
The coffee you buy in the morning - the lunch you buy at noon, the food you buy in the evening and
The pornography you buy at night.
It is an economy of sadness - here in the rich hours
Of the new dark ages.
Breughels was right when he painted Icarus - how alarming it is to find him -
A snake among a briar - the modern among the ancients.
If he had fallen a million times in the pixilated vision of a camera,
We would still plough the field and the barque would still carry its cargo
To the waiting port where merchant men will rub their hands -
Never knowing what they touch.

2003-04-27T16:53:00.000-04:00

Recipe

On Friday evening or Saturday afternoon, go shopping and ensure that you have the following in your pantry:

Corn on the cob - Silver Queen variety if available. Otherwise, sweet as season allows.

Limes - always handy to have. You'll need one or two per person to be served.

Cayenne Pepper

Parmesan Cheese - Grate about one half cup for this. More if you have guests.

Butter

Salt (table)

Coarse Salt

Tequila - a decent variety - but not necessary to have the 12 year-old stuff. Consider it briefly, and then pass it by for something on a lower shelf. Save the anejo for a different Saturday afternoon.

Triple Sec

Margarita Mix - a brand named "Freshies" is absolutely delightful. Not syrupy at all. If adventurous, make from scratch, but vastly increase you store of limes.

Once home, stow all of this away. Catch a movie. Go out with friends. If they're nice, you'll invite them over for lunch tomorrow afternoon. Call your mother. Read "The Enchanted Isles" by Herman Melville. Under its influence, consider the feasibility of expatriating to a boat under your own command. Regardless, pull closed the curtain until Sunday afternoon.

Now, as the hot afternoon sun pelts down past your kitchen window, bring a pot of water to a boil. While the water heats, shuck and scrub the corn. Arrange other ingredients on the table as relishes. The limes will have a dual use - in the drinks and in the entrée. Slice up some extra just to make the tap-water taste better.

Once the water gas boiled, add the corn to the water. Allow to boil for 10 to 15 minutes. In the meantime, take down the cocktail shaker. Fill with ice. Add tequila, triple sec, and lime mix as your preferences dictate. Shake until the outside of the metal shaker has a thin layer of rime frost, until your hands burn with the cold.

Then, cut the limes into eighths or quarters. Use a lime slice to wet the rim of the glasses. Salt as desired. Go ahead and fill the glasses with ice. Pour the mixed margaritas over the ice. Toast and?ahh, wait - the corn is just tender now. Perfect.

Remove the first steaming ears of corn. Once everyone is served, consider retiring to the patio, or the back yard, if available. Once seated again, begin to dress the corn. Just as you learned as a child, coat the ear in butter, spinning the ear while maneuvering the butter across its surface.. Next, take a lime wedge and squeeze the juice on to the ear. Rub the lime over the ear as if you were buttering the ear with citrus. If some pulp remains, so much the better.

Next the Cayenne. The heat averse should consider toughing this one out - the trip is worth it. Sprinkle cayenne to taste. You need not paint the ear red, but every bite should contain a good bit of the spice. Sprinkle the grated parmesan over the now red and pale white of the corn, covered with a sheen of butter and lime juice. Finally, salt as desired.

Now, eat with gusto. The uneasy truce of spice, sweetness, salt, and heat results in a pleasant, general burning sensation about the mouth. Running your tongue over your lip to catch bits of butter and tart lime has a cost in as much as opening your mouth is like pumping the bellows of a furnace. Your lips and tongue burn slightly, and they flare when the air hits them.

Follow a few bites with the margarita. Make sure that you have some of the salt on your tongue as you drink. The resultant mix of tastes - alcohol, salt, sour limes, and with cold creates a creaminess that surprises you. You may giggle with this flirtation with synesthesia. Continue enjoying the afternoon, until you have feasted sufficiently, and you have finished the tequila.

Now it is evening. Enjoy the cool air in the gloaming. If you have been very lucky, you have prepared this dish over a fire on a beach of white sand, or perhaps coated the corn with the mixture before grilling it in your back yard. Either way, you now watch the sun setting behind the cooling embers. They fend of the melancholy of Sunday night. You have not yet begun to think of Monday morning.

(Recipe provided by J. The discursive recipe format appears with some frequency and greater elan at Textism.)

2003-04-24T21:41:00.000-04:00

Finally

Some good news. I've long adored Moveable Type - so I can barely wait. Also, under best practices, comes a little flash application which allows you to create these maps that...well... best to let you discover for yourself.

2003-04-24T21:36:00.000-04:00

- a New Hope

Courtesy of Metafilter, a lengthy essay asserting that Iraq precipitated the war when it switched its reserve currencies from the dollar to the Euro. It looks at the conflation of oil economies and reserve currency markerts and their relationship to American hegemony.

Granted, Bush and company must be stopped. But I have imagined the American electorate doing the honors. But will we be able to handle the consequences if the means rest in the hands of others? (Via Metafilter)

2003-04-24T21:16:00.000-04:00

Consulting Metaphysician

If the internet has facilitated anything, it is the mania for self-diagnosis by check-box, in other words, the quiz. Once confined only to magazines (the venerable Cosmo for women and Stuff or Maxim, for 13 year-old boys), the internet has abetted the proliferation of the genre. You can now check your predisposition toward eating disorders, heart disease, gender purity, and just about any self-help topic you want. It moves closer toward our national destiny: to defy the uncertainty principle: we will know our velocity and our location simultaneously.

The most interesting of these that I've encountered, is the perfectly named Belief-o-Matic. This handy-dandy survey allows you to compare a cross section of feelings and beliefs against those of major religions. The result is essentially a list of religious affinities, i.e. major religions ranked by how closely your expressed beliefs match those of the groups listed. My own results were not surprising. Unitarian Universalist (100%) with Secular Humanist (99%) coming in a close second. Frightening truth:51% affinity with Scientology embeds it throroughly in the middle of the spectrum, with most forms of Islam surpassing Catholicism which placed last with a lowly 19%. Minutes of fun. Hours of debate.

2003-04-14T18:15:00.000-04:00

Collateral Damage

In the human toll that we have yet to even begin reckoning for the invasion of Iraq, we must include the loss of much of the little that we have left of more than 4,000 years of continuous civilization.

2003-04-12T09:50:00.000-04:00

Fan Letter

I like to believe in models for good behavior. I think of it as a hobby - not something you can do everyday, but a pleasure when you find the time. Most of the unmartyred saints that populate my own heroic pantheon are artists. Most critics alas, become the interpreters of the holy mysteries of others. A few succeed, however, in joining the marching-in.

Of late, one has leapt to the front of the parade. Bernard Knox, once known as a "premature anti-fascist," this classicst, translator, and critic brings an impressive array of learning and personal experiences to bear on the material that we ignore at our own peril. The result is scholarship and a warm and generous criticism. Here is a bibliography, for your perusal.

2003-03-26T19:14:00.000-05:00

War is Peace: a tonic

Here are two Orwell related resources to help cut the taste of double speak that the adminsitration continues to feed us. The first site offers the biography and online versions of a number of his works. The second, summaries of some of the works that will probably creep into many a high-school English assignment. Such, Such were the joys...

2003-03-23T11:12:00.000-05:00

Anti-War

This is an aggregator of information and links to articles that oppose the war or describe apects of the conflict that you may not hear or see on the network news (or even NPR, for that matter). It covers opposition on the left as well as the far right. Also, added Counterpunch to the recommended list. (Via Textism.)

2003-03-21T07:44:00.000-05:00

Mastermind

Richard Perle is the chairman of the defense policy board, a cvillian group consisting of interested parties connected with defense and security organizations/ corporate entities. He has also helped craft the vision of a new American Empire called "the New American Century." Usually operating behind the scenes, Mr. Perle has personally opened up a second front against another obstacle to his view of American Primacy: the U.N.

Update: The would-be architect of the ew American Empire has resigned his post as the head of the Defense Policy Board. He stays on as a member at the behest of Donald Rumsfeld.

2003-03-20T20:02:00.000-05:00

White Noise

If you live in a community (known more cynically as a "market") with multiple radio stations, a behemoth known as Clear Channel probably owns the majority of them, up to the currently mandated limit of eight. Given the size of the Clear Channel's media empire, you might expect a facade of impartiality. Think again. You must wonder of these rallies have anything to do with previous instructions in Clear Channel stations. Even in its short lifetime, this corporate citizen has developed a quite a rap sheet.

Update: A Paul Krugman op-ed piece connects ratings, profits, and the conflation of political and business interetests in Clear Channel to the conflict in Iraq. (NYT link - reg. req'd.)

2003-03-16T15:41:00.000-05:00

War Music

With this afternoon's press conference leaving little doubt on whether the President will drag the ~~country~~ world to war, I thought a little perspective could help. So, I recommend these modern interpretations of sections of Homer's Iliad, the seminal song of strife: Auden's Shield of Achilles, and an excerpt from Christopher Logue's War Music (whose next installment will be sadly pertinent).

2003-03-08T08:36:00.000-05:00

Arboreal

I might consider vacationing in my own back yard, but only if I had a treehouse like this. For the cost of an additional home, and provided you have sufficiently strong trees, you too can can join the bough-house movement.

2003-02-28T23:46:00.000-05:00

Just an ordinary guy, with nothing to lose...

There is something to say for picking up your marbles and conceding the field to the bullies who have taken over, letting them sort out their own worthless game. That said, I cannot vouch for the integrity of John Brady Kiesling, nor his performance as a diplomat in our foreign service. If he executed his duty with the same vigor and reason with which he resigned, then we have lost a valuable representative overseas. (NYT link - reg. req'd)

Edit - Apparently, the feeling that I mentioned earlier, about being shrill, conversing only in screed and shocked at your own capacity to feel this way is going around. From the always excellent, Ftrain.

2003-02-24T21:33:00.000-05:00

Recidivist

Did I mention that he lies?

2003-02-23T17:25:00.000-05:00

Acknowledgement -> Resolution -> Pursuance/ Part4 - Psalm

People who have met me do not frequently characterize me as shrill, or easily alarmed. I say this because you may not gather this from my posts of late. In order to remind myself of that, gentle reader, please indulge me in some small appreciations of works and phenomena that have provided consolation, and even delight, in spite of a sense of eroding social and political virtue (virtue in the sense of our capacity to do what is right). Here then, are a number of things that make me very happy:

Songbook by Nick Hornby

In Songbook, Nick Hornby, who gave us the obsessive, forever-adolescent male characters of High Fidelity, writes short essays on pop songs he really, really likes. His enthusiasm for the music catches easily. He eloquently defends pop music without resorting to Po-Mo, genre dissolving arguments, i.e. he likes pop music on its own terms. The essays run short - in fact you could probably listen to the song celebrated by each essay as you read it - all "real-time" as they say these days.

You may expect such an exercise to give way to a formulaic recounting of personal memories evoked by each song. Hornby does not, to his credit, resort to this. We see glints of his life outside the book, and the book business, but very little (but what we do is immensely touching). Besides, musical biography is more the style of High Fidelity's narrator. Instead, he talks about what these songs capture- what makes them worth our two and half or three minutes of our time (frequently repeated over and over). Inevitably they capture something small but pertinent to our lives. This obviously varies from song to song - artist to artist. With Ben Folds, he finds a young man capable of communicating complex rhetorical and emotional situations in touching and, even, catchy lyrics. For Led Zeppelin, he recounts what he learns from the boring bits - that it's okay to leave during the John Bonham drum solo, for example.

A lot of the pleasure of reading this book comes from the author's enthusiasm. You root for Mr. Hornby (or at least the set of preferences that we identify with him) because he's engaging in an act of appreciation. He doesn't seek to forge his own identity or fame by vivisecting an artist's corpse. Mr. Hornby gives us an example of someone deploying his critical faculties in an exuberant manner.

Solista

I know this is a weblog, and, if I were to follow the guidelines of the genre, I should link each of these topics to a site or document that proves the existence, or illuminates the experience I mention. So I have mixed feelings about not providing a link about Solista. So, I'll explain why I can't point you to URL with more information, photos, and text that encapsulates that experience for you. And then, if you ever see them, you'll thank me for it.

Solista is three young women from Finland, each a solo artist - monologist, a musician, and a videographer - that have come together to create an event. In fact, "Solista", in many languages, means soloist (frequently feminine). That's part of the reason that a Google search will yield few results actuallu pertaining to this event. So, it's not traditionally theatrical, but it took place in a theatrical space. It is a tea party, it is an opera, it is documentary, it is memory, a meta-commentary on performance, and it is a performance for the King of Finland on Independence Day. It is a picnic at high-summer in the long shanked day of a near-arctic summer.

In the event, the audience is invited into the theatre, welcomed into the space (with an image of your entrance projected via digital camcorder and projector) and , asked to have a seat (with the front two rows availing themselves of pillows and very comfy chairs). The idea that frames this performance is a ceremony celebrating the independence of Finland, a series of performances for the King of Finland. Te audience even hears snatches of a radio broadcast of the ceremony (from 1962 or so I believe).

Then the monologist begins talking to the audience. I suspect that when she stumbles over an English word, she does so on purpose, as to draw attention to the word and how meaning falls away from it or to the act of performance itself. She talks of performance, what it means to document something (showing a short video of the solistas scrubbing a floor), and recounts the difficulty of bathing in her efficiency apartment in Helsinki during her days at University. The show continues, with different performances by each soloist, but done in such a way that throws back the curtain on the idea of any solo artist working alone. The ultimate nod to this comes in the middle of the performance, when the Solistas serve the audience tea. While the fourth wall has taken quite a beating over the years, this is the most pleasant means of artists acknowledging an audience and its role in creating theatre.

The Solistas conclude with a performance of a beautiful song, which I cannot credit at the moment since I can't find my program (more on this later). While the monologist sings, the musician accompanies her on piano, and the videographer projects the translated lyrics onto the screen above. The song portrays the anguished cries of the families of the dead who have fallen in war. They cry over the anguish of their dead sons, and those killed in the country of the enemy, those whom we usually dress as "collateral damage."

You could count a hundred aspects that did not have polish - instances of technical difficulties or processes thrown out into the open. For example, their program consisted of a few handwritten pages, photocopied and folded together. But, I discount this as a complaint for two reasons. With a performance about performance, I believe that you give them the benefit of the doubt - they do this intentionally, as if to say, "Here, we do this in this manner. This is all it is. This is how we manipulate this aspect of your experience." While this has long served as a refuge of the inept, I would not count Solista among their numbers. They seem too smart and too generous to hide in that argument. In fact, their generous spirit carries the piece. You feel like you've been invited into someone's home, and to complain about the wonderful time you have doesn't even occur to you.

In fact generosity forms the core of their explication of solo performance and its relationship to the audience. The center of the piece recasts the two potential endings of capital, either as catastrophe or a gift, as a question. If this holds, what must become of art? The artist has a choice - the work can end in catastrophe(if you think about catastrophe as remote, ask an Iraqi artist about the proximity of the end of the world) or as a gift. It can end as a gift to the audience, whether that audience is the king of Finland, or forty souls in Baltimore. This was a gift, and I am lucky to be in receipt of it.

It's also a gift that they give each audience. As such, it doesn't exits as a website, a video, or, as they would say, a documentary. Since documents make up the internet, it doesn't exist in a world of html. That would arrest its capacity to be a gift - to be something that only they can give to you and something for which you can actually thank the artist in person, as almost all the audience... I mean guests... did.

2003-02-19T19:32:00.000-05:00

Congenital Syphilitic Madness

The Bush administration is quietly exploring updating the nation's nuclear arsenal. The proposed change in direction would provide more "tactical" weapons - i.e. weapons that no longer offer Mutually Assured Destruction, but offer the promise of field use. Perhaps it takes congenital syphilitic madness to make the logic of the cold war seem rational and (comparatively) comforting.

I anticipate that they will try 1) to avoid scrutiny as much as possible, and 2) attempt to sell us on the idea of an "anti-agent" bomb - one capable of destroying chemical and biological weapons stored underground or in undisclosed secure locations. The neutron bomb they describe was conceived as a weapon that would destroy all life in a target area while leaving valuable infrastructure and materiel intact. Much like treating a viral infection with chlorine bleach, the treatment's capacity to kill the pathogen doesn't bode well for the host. As lethal as these weapons are, they do not horrify as much as the clear intent to use them.

2003-02-18T22:54:00.000-05:00

Ex Libris

I have recently moved to a city in desperate need of a good, independent, literary-minded bookstore. Our recent visit to New York City drove this fact home to me quite clearly, in the form of a visit to Three Lives and Company, a small book store in Greenwich Village. Square foot for square foot, it is one of the best bookstores I have ever encountered. Granted, it cannot compete with such behemoths as the Tattered Cover, The Hungry Mind, or Powell's in terms of volume, but no bookstore has made me want to read so much. On every shelf, I found at least three books that caught my eye. Given my condition, I exercised extraordinary control.

Why does this very small, indeed wee, bookstore usurp larger independents in my literary/ erotic pantheon? Why such ardor for this upstart? Simple. This bookstore focuses on what other stores, chains in particular, relegate to a handful of shelves: literature. It focused on authors who consciously deploy language in interesting ways in a a variety of genres. While I always have recourse to Amazon, you sometimes want the interaction of a physical bookstore and its denizens. Not only the interaction with the people, but the physical act of browsing ( so recently reduced to e-metaphor). Of late, I feel like I have had your palette dulled by the mostly bland pabulum available through the chain bookstores (or face it, the chain bookstore, where I was asked to spell Homage to Catalonia and the author's name). What an odd feeling then, to walk into a place where on every shelf I could find something I that strongly beckoned me.

If you visit the store, I recommend a late afternoon of a cold winter's day. That is when the warmth of the interior light appeals most to the chapped, raw, and generally over-stimulated senses. That is when the books will be most welcome company.

If you would like to see almost the entirety of the store, the cover photo of this excellent book features a photograph that conveys the feel of the bookstore and captures almost all of its physical interior. I am amazed at what you can do with so little space.

2003-02-07T16:14:00.000-05:00

Under-reported, Smothered

The mainstream media seems intent on discounting any dissent. Last month they continued to under-report attendance at rallies opposing the impending war. Now, they discount the activities of over thirty members of the House of Representatives. A Republican and a Democrat have introduced a bill to repeal the President's blank check for war, yet the Washington Post, as well as most major media outlets have opted not to cover this story.

They have instead, opted to follow Collin Powell as he attempts to stoke the fires for war. Meanwhile, he is engaged in his own cover-up.

2003-02-06T18:51:00.000-05:00

The (Pending) Corrections

Robert Brenner, the director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA, has written a detailed analysis of the world economic crisis, the faltering US economy (in the context of the larger catastrophe), and the complicity of the governing bodies of American fiscal policy in creating multiple, dependent bubbles as bulwarks against the deflationary pressure from excess inventories. While this is, admittedly, very dry reading, I found that it clarified a great deal.

With a world economic picture that looks increasingly grim, the Bush administration has chosen to slake the urges of its revenge-seeking hawks, while appending another chapter in "the most spectacular acts of expropriation in the history of capitalism." The administration intends the war to distract us not only from the train wreck that is the global economic crisis, but also from the "stimulus package" that essentially seeks to re-inflate the bubble and continue the redistribution of wealth up the economic ladder. It essentially pays back the heaviest stockholders in Bush, Inc.

In fact, his stimulus plan consists of a war on terror that exposes us to more terror, and an economic plan that endangers the economy. What we must increasingly admit to ourselves, is that this President not only wages war overseas, but also at home.

2003-02-04T00:03:00.000-05:00

Manhattan

Copper Wire Flowers

Copper wire flowers
Break the earth's cold skin.
Mineral intelligence knows
Only absolute poles
Of heat - sun above
And forge below.

But here is the miracle
Beyond the penny bright strands,
Whose motion is just like her hair,
A memory has a medium: copper or amber-
One, once liquid now glass
The other a buried, waiting arc.

Amber traps the quick
Memory of a soul, like an ant, holding it inert
A static gem waiting to be girded with silver
And placed on an alter -
Its subject locked in the struggle
Of its last work - a rote eternity.

But copper is potential
Lying beneath the earth.
And here on the edge of the sea and the city
I can feel the galvanic hum
Of ten million souls - their chorus of myths-
Their language an electric presence.

Walking into the new year
In Chinatown, a happy accident-
I feel the electric arcs that flow out from us all.
And I see that she had been here before me
Because she planted the copper flowers
That carry the current between us.

2003-01-26T15:30:00.000-05:00

Reality Show

Ring

Ring

Digital Chime

Hi, sorry we can't come to the phone right now. Please leave a message and we'll call you back as soon as we return from the 17th century - in about 5 months. Thanks. Bye.

Message tone

Colonial House is accepting applications.

2003-01-26T15:21:00.000-05:00

Cataract

We are people of burying age.
We have lived long enough to see someone die.
We are strong enough to lift the first shovel of dirt.
We know the mystery of sex and how
It implies death. But we meet it now, suddenly
As if seeing an old classmate
While traveling in another country.

But I have long thought of this world as a river
Leading to a fierce cataract - shrouded in mist
But known through the great roar ahead -
The sound of an immense gulf and fall and flow of countless souls
Across its teeth.
In the river, in flimsy boats of bark stretched taught
Against tense frames - more switches and will than a hull,
paddle generations of my family.
My father paddles gently forward, just ahead of me.
Even though he has just seen his father
Disappear through the mist and heard his voice,
High, pinched by dementia and sickness
Join the roar of the falls.
My father paddles slowly, forward
Troubled by his father's absence
But untroubled by his own course.
He seems only to want a fishing pole
To cast about in the remaining hours.

2003-01-23T18:55:00.000-05:00

War Jamming

Protest Posters offers downloadable PDF's that give you one more option for voiceing your dissent (via Metafilter).

Or:

If You're Happy And You Know It Bomb Iraq

by John Robbins (via :::Wood s Lot:::)

And then the literati weigh in:

Causa Belli By Andrew Motion.

And John Le Carre, on American Madness.

2003-01-22T18:47:00.000-05:00

Confederacy of Dunces

As slavery is arguably America's original sin, the Civil War represents America's primal scene. We have, in fact, replayed it for the last hundred and fifty-eight years. While the guerilla organization founded by Nathan Bedford Forrest certainly was the most evident manifestation of resistance to the outcomes of the war and to integration, it is not the most dangerous. Today we see the emergence of a constellation of influential conservatives associated with the Neo-Confederate movement.

As with other "vast right wing conspiracies", it is impossible to prove orchestrated action on a concerted agenda. But what does emerge is a consistent attempt to enact policy and affect court decsions that, in effect, put affirmative action, integration, and the civil rights movement itself into retrograde. Trent Lott's opposition to the voting rights acts is a matter of record (a voting record for which he should have been removed, Freudian slip aside). We could imagine that Bush's fraternization with the Neo-Rebs (as distinct form Neo-Cons with whom they have some overlap) during the campaign amounted to Karl Rove covering his bases. With the President's policies and budget priorities, we see that the association has progressed beyond electoral convenience and into a marriage of retrogression. This weekend's announcement, coordinated with the King Holiday, that the President has requested additional funding for predominantly black colleges and schools. This apparent gift constitutes financial incentive for restoring "separate but equal" and jibes nicely with the other initiative launched the weekend: attempting to control the discussion of race by creating the impression that the Supreme Court will decide on "quotas."

The debate is not about quotas, but the administration's framing of it may make it so in the public's eye. More importantly, it may serve as the signal for an ironically activist Supreme Court. Given the history of the people involved in this decision, we may be enacting this struggle for many years to come.

2003-01-19T19:19:00.000-05:00

The Last, Perfect Day

So with four and a half billion years gone
There came and went the last perfect day.
A few seconds and the sun slipped below the ocean
On the last day better than the one before -

The last day a glacier didn't calve
From the shelves that gird the lonely outposts
Of the imagination -
The last day that the axis didn't veer more erratically
By the smallest negative
Exponent - a measurement we cannot feel,
But that staves off the disaster -
The last day that another variety of bird, insect, or toad
Didn't fall through the membrane of the thin bubble
That carries us through time.

From here on in, all will tend
Toward the water again.
And perpetual clouds will blot out the sunsets
And mute the dawns
About which we used to write
Epithets - back when you were either a Greek,
Or a barbarian.

We didn't even know that it had happed.
Even the next day wasn't so different
that you'd know exactly what happened,
But maybe when I paid attention
I could see it in the details
More of a feeling that made me question:
Did cigarettes always taste like this?
Did whiskey always tug
At my mind and remind me
So much of my birthday
So many years ago?

2003-01-13T19:29:00.000-05:00

May I have the Venti Segregationista?

According to Lloyd Grove at the Post, Kramerbooks (bookseller of the Starr-crossed Vox/ Leaves of Grass) is now selling a coffee drink they call the "Trent Lotte." It consists of equal parts coffee and milk, served in separate containers.

2003-01-11T15:04:00.000-05:00

It Takes a Lott to Laugh, it takes an Ashcroft to Cry

Way back in June, a group of cartoonists came together to create a show based based on cartoons that point out the shell game that the Bush administration is pushing: that citizens pay the cost of security in the currency of civil rights. Some of the works, collected here (link via BoingBoing), have earned the artists harassment, termination, and censorship. The cartoons themselves range from the subtle to the explicit, but all manage a disturbed chuckle.

The site also highlights one positive aspect of the current climate: the number and regional diversity of the artists. When this many people from around the country distrust an initiative, it gives me slight hope for reigning in the worst abuses. But of course, this was before Total Information Awareness. Truly dark humor at its finest.

2003-01-10T20:24:00.000-05:00

What's With the all the chit-chat? Posts and additions come slighty more frequently as I hit the archives to test out another blogging option: Radio Userland. Check out my forray into the hard drive resident blogging software here.

2003-01-10T19:15:00.000-05:00

Ante Meridian

The first drink of the day should gently pull forth a memory and dab our temples with it ? leave the face dry and perhaps a little flush, and anticipating something yet to come. It is a chemical reaction ? an acute perception about the head, while inside the head something nepenthetic is released from its cage of consciousness, and allowed to curl around the agitated centers of racing thought, and to cease their endless whine with comfort, ease, perspective, and frequently, a chuckle.

Or so I believe, or would hope. Often my first drink of the day is not sophisticated (never is it mixed). I eschew the greatly lauded sherry or pernod for something cold and intense ? a vodka, just pulled from the freezer, or (better) from a snow drift, and served neat and preferably in a narrow shot glass with ice forming from condensation clinging to the sides of that beautiful cloudy cylinder. Obviously, I’m not discussing aperitifs here. Vodka anticipates no meal, though with the right varinicki, a dumpling wrapped around potatoes and covered in subtle mushroom gravy, it can abide one.

No, this is the last resort of a mind tired of clouds and seeking the clarity of an extreme position. For lack of the disciplined denial of perspective that fundamentalism requires, I have turned to this antisocial habit ? the illicit antemeridian encounter with hard liquor.

It clarifies the thoughts and relaxes the body. The mind becomes the body’s arc in space and action. Imagine a glass of ouzo clouding from the ice you’ve dropped in ? now play that film backwards ? the milky white nebula contracting, clinging closer to the ice and then disappearing entirely. That is the mental journey I make under the lash of the drink.

But why must you do this in the indelicate morning. All the joys of liquor, the inequities of this vice grow exponentially as you recede from Noon towards dawn. Remember the murder perpetrated by that habitual absinthe imbiber _____ who would begin with a bracing local marc, compounded by brandy, all before sunup. This man killed his wife, children, and botched his own suicide under the derangement of the demon rum. Is not the habit I endorse a step towards this life and this end?

Let’s get something straight ? I’m not endorsing anything. I’ve already told you I lack the disciplined inflexibility of interpretation for fundamentalism (I’m also a poor allegorist), and so I won’t tell you how to live your life. These lines speak only for me. If you share these proclivities then wonderful, you may read on out of familiarity. If not, you were probably offended or bored long ago.

So why not crawl indo the bower of the green fairy and dwell there in perpetuity? This may come as a surprise to you, but there is a notion of trial at work here. I have always mentioned a single drink ? the ones that have followed that initial drink are your creation only. Because I silence certain demons with a very earthly holy water does not make me an alcoholic. You have lined up the drinks at the bar - I have had one - in the bright hard morning, barefoot and clear eyed standing in the kitchen under white sunlight.

2003-01-09T20:34:00.000-05:00

There's so much to like about Mastication Is Normal that I must be uncharacteristically brief: design, story, humor. All in spades.

2003-01-08T22:35:00.000-05:00

Political Fictions / Redux

Joan Didion writes essays that are knives made of diamonds - clear, hard, and with a frighteningly precise geometry, one devoid of sentiment. She quietly and almost demurley pulls the meat of rhetoric, emotion, and politics away from the bone of the issue itself - blanching the white surface in the sun. Hers is the subtle wit.

This craft takes time, however - glacial months have passed while the volcanic pamphleteer Christopher Hitchens has engaged in non-stop eruption. In fact, her last book, Political Fictions, took a relatively long view on modern American politics - reviewing the span of 1998 to 2000. I have been waiting for a Didion essay dealing with the aftermath of the New York/Washington attacks. She once again produces an artifact of great precision, and one that cleanly dissects the corpse of political opposition and our muddled response of stalling acquiescence in the aftermath of America's response to terrorism.

2003-01-04T18:05:00.000-05:00

What happens when your labor department issues reports that directly contradict your insistence that economic recovery is imminent if not already occurring? You quietly pull the plug on the program that produces the most contradictory reports.

Is the movement towards an executive branch unfettered by public awareness and oversight consequent or coincidental to the move towards empire? SF gate Link courtesy of Boing Boing.

2003-01-02T19:32:00.000-05:00

Timeless

It cheers me to read that Milton can still incite controversy after 350 years. It amuses me that no one can parody the academy the way that it does itself. The New York Observer has another story to tell about what really furrows brows at the MLA: not the validity of evaluating historical attitudes or actions through modern criteria (while ignoring the historical moment itself), but the availability of jobs in a market place whose primary indicator of worth, publication, becomes more and more elusive. With academic publishing shrinking, and with adventurous small and medium presses disappearing, the publish or perish ethic becomes even more intense.

The good news is that Stephen Greenblatt now presides over the MLA. At the same time, I think he's past the publish/ perish point of his career.

2003-01-01T19:12:00.000-05:00

New Year

I spent the final hours of 2002 enjoying drinks and the company of friends in Baltimore's Hampden neighborhood. This neighborhood makes the aesthetics of John Waters movies explicable. All things that you hear used to describe Baltimore - odd customs and products associated exclusively with Charm City - become manifest in this neighborhood. Its blue collar residents actually say "Hon" (and I cannot properly recreate the pronunciation ) as a means of direct address, drink Natty-Boh (National Bohemian) Beer, and go to Maime's Cafe for $7 lobsters on Wednesday night.

But during this time of year, the epicenter for the camp aesthetic lies on the 700 west block of 34th street. We refer to it as, not surprisingly, Miracle on 34th Street. Imagine the artistic agenda of the counter-reformation as deployed using only electric Christmas lights and statuary found in thrift stores. It truly dazzles the observer.

While the display begins after Thanksgiving, it builds during the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve. It comes to its electro-luxe crescendo at the stoke of Midnight on New Year's Day - the hinge between years. It was at just about this time that my friends and I, in masquerade dress, walked into the semi-daylight of Hampden to watch the Baltimorean masque unfold. At the stroke of midnight (the organizers synchronized the drop with Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve which I could hear on blaring out of a television inside the house in front of which we all stood) someone at the end of a clothesline pulley lowers a ball created by winding multiple cords of Christmas lights together in a Gordian knot. The ball descends into a black box with the numeral 2003 cut in relief. Moments afterward, a middle aged man wearing a thick mustache and an adult sized diaper rushes forth from the house - he is our baby new year.

I will confess great difficulty in relating this without some eye-rolling. Of course the air crackles with an electric current of kitsch (or at the very least, arcs several times an hour). But when the ball does drop, and the diaper clad fool does run into cheering crowd, we feel only excitement unalloyed with the irony, cynicism, or the ambivalence of the previous year. The champagne corks fly into the air and we kiss with joyous mouths under the spray of bubbles. Bottles pass round with no care for the troubles of 2002, or awareness of the cultivated aesthetic of nudge-winking. We are truly happy to symbolically begin again. Despite the garishness of the display, we experience real emotion.

Perhaps that is an emotional fault - that we can be tricked even by a shoddy post-modern carnival show. But I feel wonder because it seems to be, for me at least, the first unadulterated joy of the season. I think many people have had some difficulty finding the right emotional pitch for this holiday season. This year the enforced gaiety of commerce shows the strain more than usual. The holidays seemed to have taken us by surprise. We force smiles when we have more reasons to cry, but choose not to think of them. Let us then take this opportunity so perfectly fit to our mood, to the feel something together again.

Enjoy the passing of the old year, with its beautiful and sad complexity (which truly has its joys). But the purpose of this evening is to feel that burden lifted for a short while - just long enough to consider what we want to be and how it differs from what we are now.

In the last weeks, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about many things: the poetry of defeat, John Milton, how to turn catastrophe into art, what to do with " this one wild life," how to enact an ethos, and many other matters that tend to flit about my mind. I am not one to make public resolutions, or to make to-do lists that contain metaphysical action-items. I do reserve the right, however, to make pronouncements and decisions and to do so in this space. Therefore I have decided that I need to cultivate in myself graciousness, mercy, intelligence, and advocacy for these virtues. We have but eighty years or so - and frequently, sadly less - in this world. And we know of no other. The beauty we see may be all the beauty that exists and while it's a great and noble project to imagine a place more beautiful yet, let us not neglect beauty and authenticity in this world. As Louis Mac Neice wrote:

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

Thus resolved, I wish everyone a happy and peaceful new year.

2002-12-30T21:28:00.000-05:00

I am delighted that I now have a measure against which to gauge my own daily exploits. However rough my day at the office, I have only to read the analagous day in the diary of Samuel Pepys to see that, as long as the black death stays its hand and a great fire doesn't consume Baltimore (we can only hope), then I can salvage something from the day. Praise to Phil Gyford for undertaking this project. He augments this version of the text with footnotes on another 'blog. Fantastic work. Link courtesy of Metafilter

2002-12-29T00:09:00.000-05:00

In Memoriam

Meredith Fonda Russell

Words are not sufficient. Words are all we have.

2002-12-24T12:07:00.000-05:00

Previous Post: Cleaned up and reposted. I will post infrequently during the holidays due to my travel schedule. A higher frequency of posts should begin after the New Year's beginning. Resolved.

2002-12-19T00:22:00.000-05:00

Comparison

While in Denver, émigrés from the east and west coasts would frequently pay Denver a back-handed complement: "Denver's great for not being a real city." Considering the population of 554,000 in Denver alone (not counting Aurora, or any of the cities numerous and interchangeable suburbs), I never really understood this assertion. Denver provides a home for half a million people, their government, their economy and their culture. How does this deviate from the modern definition of the city – the imperial center that aggregates wealth and materiel, while broadcasting its culture to the periphery?

Denver does indeed meet the theoretical definition of a city. It even meets the High-Powered French Theorist version of a city: the location of Astral America - the place where we reify our fictions (including/ especially our grand narratives) to subordinate the ageless geography that laps at the edges and flows into an under the city itself. In all ways it matches our expectations of the urban area: traffic, a mildly congested downtown, sports franchises, and the same collection of chain-link stores that change citizens into consumers in every American city. But the observation still persists - Denver mimics a city’s charms, but it remains a small town. In the imaginations of the newly arrived, long time ex-pats, and even the savvier residents, it remains a cow-town, known for an omelet and a parking control device. But what makes it so sub-urban to these emissaries from the effete precincts of the coasts?

While the preceding question bears the provincial bias of a member of a small town chamber of Commerce, it also reflects the hubris and unevenly alloyed self-image of Denver. The mayor's office frequently makes reference to Denver as a "World Class City” and, as they should, competed desperately for the favor of major corporations (United Airlines most recently), high profile events (multiple Winter Olympics bids since they turned one down in the 70's), and the entertainment industry based on that image. Denver desperately wants to project an air of cosmopolitan urban, delectation while insisting on its friendliness toward families and corporations. Denver also wants, however, to retain a patina of lingering trail dust, an affectation of the old west.

In some ways, this represents a more authentic version of Denver. The stockyards and train yards still stretch out busily on the plains. They form great, reticulated labyrinths of steel fence and rail through which great beasts move in regulated patterns, as in long observed ritual. These reminders of economies past provided much of the money in town prior to the oil boon of the 1970's. But it is something that World Class Cities simply do not do.

Historically, Denver has always seen the cyclical return of money based on the mineral wealth of the region. In the nineteenth century, miners laid siege to the front range in search of gold and, later and more fruitfully, silver. . In fact, Denver was founded as miners found trace amounts of gold in the waters of the South Platt River. While the gold didn't last long, the settlements that sprang up out of those short lived mining camps became Denver. Denver's first suburb, Park Hill, actually developed when citizens left downtown, fleeing the debauchery of the miners who had come down from the mountains for the vices that only a mining town can reliably provide. Silver carried the cost of building up (and periodically rebuilding) the city from an aggregation of frequently flooded wooden saloons to an ordered city of brick and marble. It even took Colorado from a territory to a state. But silver would become the first mineral cross on which Colorado hung her ardent belief and self-image. Since the value of silver depends upon the capricious whims of the market, Denver saw its first speculative bubble burst early in its history. It repeated that cycle with oil in the 70's, never seeing the great recession of the 80's - already written in its history.

This is all to just to say that Denver has never been as stable or as “world class” as it believes itself to be. But what keeps it from being a real city? The answer lies in a particular trait of Americans: we resolve conflict though space rather than over time.

I now live in Baltimore, Maryland. I live just a little under two miles from the city's inner harbor, perhaps a more familiar landmark for many. I have to confess an ignorance of the history of the city. For instance, I have no idea why row houses prevail as the dominant form of residential dwelling in urban Baltimore (other that the evident efficiency of space they offer). Because of this ignorance, I will have to content myself, and you, dear reader, with a description of Baltimore, and of my encounters with the city.

Navigating Baltimore is essentially a comic and instinctive act rather than rational - a kind of gambling, betting that certain streets do not terminate abruptly, change name, veer off unexpectedly, suddenly merge onto the beltway, or do any numbers of these in combination. As in many older cities in the east, a notion of rational grid has long since faded, if it ever existed. A few main thoroughfares actually traverse the town. These are the main arteries for traffic. The other streets tend toward the labyrinthine. They wind through the city only to terminate suddenly, or in a way that creates an odd juxtaposition. For example, Falls Road runs from semi-rural estates to a gritty, urban body-dumping ground – in a surprisingly short distance. The way road construction and traffic move, some neighborhoods become very isolated. You find Mount Washington, for example, at the end of the intersection of a very meandering Lake Avenue and one of the more verdant parts of Falls Road. It feels like a small, yuppie-ish village, though it actually lies within the city limits.

I happen to live on mixed-use street – meaning some residences in second and third floor apartments above business that occupy a ground floor. The renown Baltimore Row house (town houses taken to the nth power) does not dominate this block as it does others. A mixture of commerce, concerned organizations and general seediness keep people moving through the neighborhood on most evenings, thus avoiding some of the blight that strikes others nearby. You will also see an unexpected concentration of Korean owned businesses on my street. This adds a surprisingly cosmopolitan flavor to an area that is in many ways quite unremarkable.

The businesses that a driver heading north on Charles Street will encounter:
Geri's - a liquor store and fried food emporium, featuring the ubiquitous lake trout as well as frog legs and what I can only suppose are staples of the cuisine called "Delmarva."
WYPR - 88.1 FM - Your public radio station (an excellent public radio station, tune in to the Marc Steiner show to listen for local and regional politics and interests).
Methadone Clinic
Insurance Office
Dept. of Corrections Parole Office
Several hair salons, catering to an African-American clientele, though the closest Barber Shop (complete with pole) advertises haircuts in three languages.
Catholic Charities Office
Law Firms
CPA's
2 barber shops
1 Safeway
Locksmith
Several small eateries - walk in diners, set up in shotgun style garden level apartments. On cold mornings when the damp, cold air holds everything to the ground, you can smell the griddles up and down the street.
Baltimore Poverty Center
Korean Grocery Store

As in much of Baltimore, a block on either side will take you to places that most people, especially kids from rural Kentucky, never know exist. A boarded up building, one that looks uninhabitable, may house an unknown number of shifting denizens - young men on street corners shout out "greens!" advertising the crack sold in small green capped vials. The dealers in this neighborhood seem to be about home delivery – they drive about, not so they can move along when the police cruisers come through. Mostly car based dealing, though I have my suspicions about a couple buildings. But this concern is no different from the ambivalence that most people seem to feel here. You don't worry about it - it becomes something you keep in the back of your mind. It becomes architecture of vestigial knowledge - a set of circumstances that trigger a visceral reaction when you see a constellation of signs - the SUV on the corner again, the music at 3 AM, sudden emptiness of the street, the crowd of people you’ve never seen on the block before.

By the numbers, 25% of the populace lives under the poverty line. 10% (over 60,000) of the city's population lives from fix to fix. Consequently, HIV/AIDS also takes a greater toll on Baltimore than other cities in the region. We rank 2nd in America in the number of violent crimes (assault, robbery, rape, and murder), behind Detroit. But because of these issues, there is no pretending that the city doesn't have problems. Consequently, you encounter a higher level of political discourse than in any other community in which I have lived. Political discussions lurk under the complaints exchanged over coffee, or over a backyard fence. People closely watch the actions of police commissioners. The mayor has even driven to a local radio station to defend himself (verbally and then physically) when an on-air attack transgressed all propriety. This last incident personified Baltimore - picked on frequently, but scrappy when preyed upon. But my encounter with Baltimore has convinced me that the specters of indifference haven't taken everyone yet.

And this is where Denver and Baltimore part company as cities. Baltimore's closeness has collapsed the structures that allow Denver to ignore its own problems. Housing prices in Denver stratify neighborhoods by class (and frequently by race as an afterthought). The flat housing market in Baltimore brings us in close proximity to the problems connected with the drug trade. We cannot pretend that this happens in tract housing in a suburb. Here we see the clientele drive in from the suburbs to buy crack and heroin in downtown before getting back on the JFX or I-95. We cannot ignore this because it happens so close to our lives that we think of as being bounded by normality - and this violence and potential for indiscriminate death lingers just across this very thin membrane. Here in Baltimore, more people see through that membrane, see the violence burst through into their proscribed lives. Baltimore is a city because it is too small to pretend that a problem belongs to Druid Park or SoWeBo.

Indeed, Baltimore has taught me a lesson that Denver could not as it exists now: Americans do pay attention when not anesthetized by affluence, comfort, and distance. This is the virtue of a city.

2002-12-14T14:30:00.000-05:00

Even the logo is terrifying.

The ACLU has seen an increase in membership in the wake of the war on freedom waged by the Administration and an all too compliant congress. This link will show a brief advocacy ad for the ACLU (hyperbolic, but no less than the claims of the Administration and its hounds). After the ad, click on the link to the actual site for the TIA office. Even in the clinical language of a beuracratese, it is plainly creepy and a step toward the realization of the American Dystopia.

2002-12-04T10:50:00.000-05:00

And now for something completely different. It appears that people who did not geek out and play D&D saved all that creative energy for scarring their children for life. (courtesy of Ben Hammersley ).

2002-11-29T10:40:00.000-05:00

I suppose we shall soon find out the difference between a war criminal and a terrorist. As long as the investigation doesn't take Mr. Kissinger to France or to the Hague, he should be able to execute his duties.

2002-11-26T07:16:00.000-05:00

So it's Over the river and through the woods - traveling to the family homestead for Thanksgiving. Happy Holiday. Please indulge in that most America of deadly sins - gluttony!

2002-11-23T22:38:00.000-05:00

Greatest Hits

While writing this evening, I went back through the document that has served as a journal for almost four years now. Of course in those years I have also filled notebooks with my writing and, more recently, a weblog. IN my case the digital archive has the conspicuous advantage of legibility. That is something that my handwritten journals cannot offer years later, or to be quite honest, even 10 minutes after writing.

So I spent some time going back through those journals. I find myself dwelling on the same questions and on the same problems as I faced years ago. There are also entries however, where I wish exactly for what I have now. I suspect that what I find most disturbing is the fact that I am beginning to measure my adulthood in in terms of many years - that I am frighteningly continuous with the person who wrote these entries four years ago.

Some things about me that remain the same:

Existential Queasiness - not quite Nausea, but I still can't get past that we " die at last, too soon" - probably never will stop being fascinated by Sex and Death and how the two are related. I know its juvenile and a trademark of maudlin adolescents, but these essential phenomena that figuratively bracket our lives seem like they merit more than the moribund commodification they receive from television. To wit, from March 11, 2000:

When we are children, we don't even know what it's like to be an adult. And when you get here, you wonder if you would have gone on if you had known that adulthood is the smaller undiscovered country, but it's also the next to last time that you won't know what the next phase of existence will be like. And it's the greater portion of our lives that we can expect to know what will follow day after day. That's what it feels like right now. I remember being a child standing in our front yard between the twoenormous maple trees - I didn't know a thing about love or desire or work or anything beyond the immediate needs of a child. Now I feel like I'm standing in Mongolia - alone on the roof of the world, I can see what's coming for a hundred miles. Here comes the twister.

Other continuities:

My relationship with J

A search for discipline in writing

A search for discipline in an exercise routine

A deep ambivalence regarding writing

An abiding love of Sunday mornings and cups of coffee enjoyed at the Market (and elsewhere)

The fact that I have known Alayne since 1999 (!)

A deep concern with my friends' happiness

A delight in music

A delight in music that is mostly sad and desolate

A precise sense of what makes a perfect day

Other items which I will not list here (sparing you and me both, buddy)

Apparently I am generally a happy person, but have recurring issues that may wax an wain in intensity, but follow me through life. I also maintain, however, a resolute sense of what pleases me and what constitutes a good life. This may seem like an elementary discover to make at the age of 29, but identity can surprise you when you realize how fixed you have become. While the arm may extend far from the foot of the compass, the circle it describes is the same. Given my self narrative (you have one too, admit it), varies between the mytho-heroic (Odysseus, the man of many paths - the man of constant sorrow in yet another guise), an elaborate conceit by Martin Amis (an arrow fired through time), or a simple and beautiful metaphor from Middle english (a beautiful and awful white bird flying out of and into the night so, so quickly), the constancy of identity feels like a heart being made obdurate (by sin, Mr. Milton). We like to think of ourselves as dynamic, interesting, ever-changing. My predictability (as well as my sudden nostalgia) gives the lie to my sense of constant change in myself.

Keep in mind, I like my continuities, they simply suprise me as they seem legion. The quintessentially American narrative remains one of self-authorship - or re-invention. But I offer a caveat: we code our flaws and strengths into everything we create - that includes our selves.

2002-11-23T19:17:00.000-05:00

Though I understand the use of templates produces standardized blogs, seeing an Icelandic version of your blog does give you pause. But I quickly regain my composure - since this blogger has covered the new James Bond film, I no longer have to see it. Thanks.

NB: Post corrected on 12-25-02 to actually reflect the true nationality and language of the blogger, per comments! Thanks.

2002-11-19T13:55:00.000-05:00

MiniLove

Quietly, Admiral John Poindexter has crept back into public service. The man who admitted to not telling the President of his scheme to finance the arming of the contras using funds generated through the sale of arms to Iran has now ensconced himself in a position at DARPA. He is busily overseeing the Information Awareness Office, a project or series of projects that make John Ashcroft look like a privacy advocate.

The pork-laden Homeland Security bill combined with this ongoing development has me at my wits end! When will we say enough is enough? Write your senators and representatives now and let them know that you oppose this. Also demand that they, as Trent Lott dismissively offered, "re-examine" the suspect line items of the Homeland security bill. We are no safer now than we were on September 10, 2001 - but we have lost a great deal more tham 3,000 lives. We have lost the liberty of 300 million.

2002-11-19T07:36:00.000-05:00

Charm City, in the manner of Harper's index:

Chance in ten that that a citizen of Baltimore is addicted to heroin: 1
Chance in four that a citizen of Baltimore lives below the poverty line: 1
Rank of Baltimore among US Cities by Per Capita Murder Rate (Descending): 2
Year in whcih Baltimore enjoyed its peak population: 1956
Percentage decrease from that high as of 2002: 40

Despite this, I like Baltimore. It takes resilience to maintain the number of events, cultural organziations, cultural facilities, and civic dialogue that Baltimore has in spite of some formidable obstacles. It maintains fabtastic art museums, the National Aquarium, and two symphony orchestras with a population of 600,000. Additionally, it has a phenomenal punlic radio station in WYPR (one that is located less that a block away from my house). Despite Maryland's recent succumbing to the national pathology for electing republicans, it is largely Democratic and there exists a long tradition of civic dialogue and political involvement.

In some ways, the Baltimore of my imagination has always had one chief citizen and civic exemplar: Edgar Alan Poe. It is the city of gothic imagination and proportion. In fact, just out my window there is an extremely old church whose spire contains thin, arrow-slot style windows - five in the shape of a very narrow cross. It dominates the sky outisde my window, especially on cloudy days, of which there are legion here in Baltimore. It looks as if the cornerstone should date from the 17th century instead of the 18th. It seems less a product of enlightenment than some throwback to a wild, Gothic imagination - a mind which ideas overtake as if they were the wind across a blasted heath.

Of blasted heaths there are few, if any, here. the city is thick with foliage and trees. It is still quite beautiful. In fact, this morning when talking with J., we agreed that when we talk about fall, we are talking about fall on the eastern sea board of the US. Rolling hills covered with deciduous trees rampant with color - arched boughs raining leaves over two lane roads, leaves blowing across the pavement - bright cold mornings when the wind pierces your coat and sears the lungs. It is what we imagine when we sing "Over the River and Through the Woods."

True, I miss the sunshine. The 300 plus days/year that we enjoyed was indeed a luxury. Baltimore has made me aware of many luxuries that I enjoyed. That I took for granted. It is educational, living here. If anything, it is illustrative od the adage that civilization is only three meals away from barbarism.

2002-11-03T23:14:00.000-05:00

A note: this may be the last update for some time. I have added a link to Stand Down - the Left-Right Blog Opposing the Invasion of Iraq. While I have the occasional screed against the adminsitration, these folks are more balanced and more focused. Cooler heads will prevail. Thanks to the Jerry at Civia for the reminder on this one.

The reason for this sudden outage: I am making a transcontinental move starting on Tuesday. As such, I will be without internet access for some time - how long, I cannot say. Before then, I want to mention that I am leaving some of the greatest friends in the world. Of course I do this with mixed emotion. But I must add that I cannot wait to move, for I am looking forward to seeing Her once again.

So tonight, when the clouds have finally blown across the sky leaving a dark blue sky to soak up the light from downtown skyscrapers - tonight I feel like Odysseus, setting sail once again with the surf pounding on a distant beach, its song as alluring as the sirens' - yet more enduring. And somewhere over the slow, sad music of the water, is Penelope.

2002-11-03T18:08:00.000-05:00

This morning I had planned to spend some time writing about some ideas contained in a book I’m reading while connecting those ideas to Bowling for Columbine, the latest effort by documentary film-maker Roger Moore. I awoke fully prepared to discuss the culture of fear. Instead, an article about the actions of a regional government in Spain caught my eye.

It seems officials in Extremadora, the far western region of Spain, have grown increasingly wary of their information technology being controlled by a U.S. Corporation, the ever-maligned Microsoft. In this suspicion, they join the Germans who (barring a regime change initiative by the White House) currently seek a way to disentangle the Seattle-based company from their own IT infrastructure. Spain also joins the Italians who, for security reasons have converted the PC’s of the national telephone company so to avoid the well known security-gaps of Windows and its inextricably entwined Office suite. To this end, Extremadora has begun a mass conversion of the operating systems of government pc’s – converting them from Windows to Linux.

Linux, in its various versions (Redhat, Mandrake, etc.), is an operating system predicated on the beliefs of the open-source computing movement – the idea of free software with source code made available and modifiable by the community of users who work with the software. The software remains free as long as users who modify the code make those changes or new incarnations available to the community. Its advocates associate free operating systems and applications with free minds. Named after Linus Torvald, Linux has to date been a field of collaboration of the hardcore developers, power users, and those with enough technical expertise to make their egalitarian views on computing take a form other than buying a Mac.

The conversion went as poorly as one would expect. Government officials spent as many as ninety days moving between two systems whose functionality had been compromised in the attempted conversion. Linux machines have had difficulty with multimedia files (getting device drivers to work has been problematic for some users). Documents and files did not translate well. Most users now have partitioned drives so they may switch from one system to another. In some cases, they simply have two machines on which to carry on the work of state.

Recent weeks has seen better tidings for these IT defectors. Web developers still encounter difficulties in the creating documents that look the same on the two platforms, and will continue to face difficulties as long as Internet Explorer maintains its monopolistic grip on the browser market. Opera, Mosaic, and Mozilla users face similar difficulties everyday.

Following a domino theory of market share, Microsoft has brought some resources to stop this change on the periphery of the empire. Given the difficulties that it is facing in Central Europe, and the fact that Great Britain has also started to consider switching to an open source platform., Microsoft has some concerns. That much (and more) is contained in the article. What I find interesting here is the collision of government, a transnational monopoly, and nationalism all in a place where these factors have met before.

First of all we must realize the degree to which anyone must be galled by Microsoft in order to undertake this step. You are so fed up that you are willing to, as our President might say, “go it alone” in terms of technical support and application development. You must be willing to accept the possibility that you will not be able to read documents or have your documents read by an overwhelming majority of other computer users. Imagine the ire required to make giving up vast libraries of software palatable. Not to mention the difficulty and expense involved in such a conversion.

There are two reasons this difficult path may appeal to a local government in Spain and one of these may, in fact, appeal to anyone. Primarily, charges levied against Linux by Microsoft should be regarded as tendentious extrapolations of fact. For what Linux lacks in official technical support, it makes up with its tremendous user community and copious amounts of literature devoted to it. Linux users participate in a project with tens of thousands of authors. Microsoft, whose own technical support is infamous, especially with the advent of XP, wants you to believe “unsupported” means “alone.” They also would like you to ignore the sheer number of critical bugs and possible points of exploitation created in the constellation of Outlook, Office, Outlook Express and Explorer. They demonize alternatives and fill you with the existential dread of the inability to register your own existence while in the middle of a crowd.

Secondly, this administration has clearly signaled its willingness to align itself with Microsoft. Historically, when governments and monopolies collude, we call it fascism. Here we call it “privatization,” or “complex market forces.” With the settlement gutted and, stuffed, and mounted, Microsoft enjoys the imprimatur of the Bush administration. This comes at a price – the fortunes of companies so inextricably linked with the United States of America then suffer the same fortunes as our own international reputation. IN this case, Microsoft finds itself in a situation where all things American are now viewed with the suspicion that Europe reserves for a unilateralist world-cop. Microsoft has enjoyed the unilateral power to alter standards that the current administration now wants try out: the power to alter standards of statecraft , leadership, and international law.

Now let us view the actions of the Extremadoran municipalities through a final prism: recent history. They react against the chauvinistic actions of entities that feel that the rest of the world has little choice in their actions: the United States and Microsoft. The Spanish have had their fill of Corporate Nationalism. Francisco Franco, after all, is still dead.

2002-10-27T11:25:00.000-05:00

Dissent and war news
in seventeen syllables
all via Dayku.

2002-10-27T10:55:00.000-05:00

Something is Happening Here

Sometimes you get to see your heroes, maybe just in time. He played a great set and even dedicated “The Times They Are A’Changin’” to a fallen comrade. In place of the more familiar alternatioin between electric and acoustic guitars, Dylan also threw keyboards into the mix. Truly a great performance, particularly the raucous “Summer Days.”

2002-10-26T18:19:00.000-04:00

I suppose the internet is indeed a state of perpetual present tense - where all things are simultaneous. Case in point: Arts and Letters Daily returns.

2002-10-25T11:38:00.000-04:00

I just added a link to a great poetry index, the University of Toronto's Representative Poetry Online. This, and the newfallen snow on Mount Evans catching the sunlight has just shot my work ethic all to hell. Read this - enjoy the day. It is the only imperative.

2002-10-21T10:49:00.000-04:00

You know what...it's exactly like this.

2002-10-20T20:04:00.000-04:00

When news of the official release of Dylan's Royal Albert Hall concert from '61 came down, I immediately said to myself, "Great! Maybe they'll also release something from The Rolling Thunder Review." Good news.

2002-10-20T19:57:00.000-04:00

Epiphany / Appreciation

In the fall of 1993, I took a course in (English) Romanticism, that is the literature, primarily the poetry, of England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. To specify further – it was the poetry that dealt with the role of the mind in creating the world – a poetry that rose in reaction and critique of enlightenment. It focused on the major English poets from Wordsworth through Byron, with special emphasis on Blake and Shelley. We also looked for strains of romanticism in later incarnations – different guises – from Bob Dylan Lyrics to Bruce Chatwin essays.

At the time, I was aged 19 years. I feel comfortable in saying that I understood “ Critique of Enlightenment” better than I did real world experiences. To be fair and Romantic all at once, that may be the indictment that only and older self can hand down. At the time, I really anticipated enjoying my Renaissance Lit class much more. Initially, that proved true. However, after the dreary, gothic imaginings of Cowper and Walpole, we began our consideration of Wordsworth. This began my appreciation but ultimately, inadequate understanding with Romantic poetry.

I remember sitting in the Humanities Seminar Room of the Humanities building of American College X. I was sitting with a handful of, at that time, close friends. I guess we had been perceived to have formed a clique. Perhaps that locution hides not that the perception creates a reality, but maybe we did and that was perceived.

Our treatment of the Wordsdworth started by looking at, among others, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798 (for the sake of brevity, we will opt for Tintern Abbey – rather than the less descriptive “Lines”). My friends, Johnny and Ryan (woman) and I sat there among the decades old couches having done the bare minimum of preparation for the class. I skimmed the poem and had a couple of scribbles in the margins. From my first reading, I remember nothing substantial – in fact I remember thinking that the whole thing felt rather boring.

In some ways, the reading that we did there, in class was my first reading of the poem. I think it may have been the others’ first reading of the poem as well. Maybe I am extrapolating from our reactions. Maybe I am creating those reactions now as I write this over nine-years later on a very similar autumn day. But In an unhurried and almost dusty room with fall raging on outside the windows, we read the poem line-by-line.

Looking back, I see how clearly how the poem begins in the speaker’s memory– recalling the experience of five years previous. How the poem deals with the mind making the world around it. How “steep and lofty cliffs,/ that on a wild scene impress / Thoughts of a more deep seclusion” work on the landscape around them through the mind of the speaker. The interaction with a strange and savage landscape – one of indifferent beauty and power, provides those memories and remembered feelings that “account for the “best portion of a good man’s life/, His little nameless unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love.”

The speaker recalls the effects of these landscapes, and what they have meant to him when, in the poet’s words from another poem, “the world is too much with us.” The poem builds to this crux – a turning point. The depiction of the movement of a mind is beautiful. The poem takes you with it. It was amazing – the three of us were laughing as we took this unexpected e-ticket ride along with the speaker of the poem. Suddenly not only for the speaker, but for us, these memories lighten the burden of this “unintelligible world” putting us in a mood in which “the affections gently lead us on.” Ultimately, it is this mood that allows us to become that transcendent living soul, and here’s where the poem takes out the stops – and “with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,/ We see into the life of things.”

Whether it was too stuffy and the lack of oxygen had the perverse effect of making us susceptible to romantic hallucinations, or whether we all took a small trip, we all reported the most amazing effects later. That line in particular, seemed very powerful at the time. Even today, this afternoon, reading the poem here at a kitchen counter, I feel that euphoria again. But now I understand the rest of the poem, and why that is perhaps even more important.

Contrary to what I saw on the page, and how I felt at that moment, the poem continues. The speaker realizes that not only is he enjoying a moment of five years gone by, but that this moment above the Wye, he will take this moment with him as “life and food / For Future years.” He also begins to articulate how he is different now, no longer the “man flying from something he dreads,” but a man “who sought the thing he loved.” He reflects that his love of nature was an animal passion, a “coarser pleasure” of his boyish days. This appreciation of the natural world was “An appetite… that had no need of remoter charm,/ By thought supplied nor any interest / unborrowed from the eye.” It was a voracious response of youth to the physical beauty of the natural world – compounded by the need to escape the dark precincts of London and the harrowing worry of profit.

The speaker now confesses that gone are the aching joys and dizzy raptures, replaced by the “still, sad music of humanity… of ample power to chasten and subdue.” The speaker now is able to perceive in beauty a sense of the sublime – a perception of beauty in a landscape or scene that is powerfully indifferent to his humanity. It is:

“… a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is in the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”

The speaker perceives a sense of something larger than himself, larger even than his imagination, in the world, made manifest by charismatic landforms. It is this sense that becomes his moral guide, the better angel of his nature.

In a motion that still surprises me, the speaker reminds the reader that he isn’t talking to her – he’s addressing a friend. It’s a starting shift, occurring in the middle of a line buried as the fifth in its stanza. In her (let’s call the friend “her” in observance of Romantic convention of men lecturing women on “how to feel;” this tradition includes Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach and the feminist re-working, Dover Bitch) he perceives his former self and his appetitive appreciation of nature. He then begins what can best be described as a prayer – a blessing. His mind moves from the self outward to concern for another. And for “his dear, dear Friend” he wished that “When these wild ecstasies shall be matured / Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind / Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, / Thy memory shall be as a dwelling place / For all sweet sounds and harmonies.”

The poem concludes with this blessing, elaborated for the reader and, we suppose, the speaker’s audience within the poem. As a 19 year old, I really stopped reading when I could “see into the life of things.” I was encountering the poem just as speaker’s previous self had encountered nature, with a wild-eyed ecstasy. It was that moment that I carried with me into the sad and close rooms of the work world. Of days of “getting and spending and laying waste my powers.” But now, something is different.

You of course point out that I am 9 years older now. And you may even be so bold as to point out that it only took the speaker 5 years to put this together. Slow learning aside, I am different and the world around me is different. I no longer work in the rarefied silliness that is a university. I work in an office. I am more familiar with the “dreary intercourse of daily life.” I did not understand that then. I only understood the light headed feeling of finding beauty and wanting that all the time. I had not taken those memories into the world.

I also did not understand the sublime. And I confess that I do not know that I would have if I had not moved to Colorado in the fall of 1996. Here is where the earth meets the sky. This is the edge of the bubble at which we exist. These days, the light as it falls from the setting sun, over the mountains onto the edge of the plains – it breaks your heart with just the color. It always puts me in the mind of “worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.” It reminds me that, “It is the blight man was born for, / It is [myself] that [I] mourn for.” And more importantly, I have gone over Kenosha pass at various intervals, hoping for that feeling that overwhelms you the first time – the feeling that makes it difficult to drive because there are tears running down your face. I have driven across the San Luis Valley wordless and delighted to under such mountains and in such air that I want to dissolve into nothingness – to lay down in a stream in that essential act of self-oblivion - breathing a finer ether while breathing the water.

So I have come here and felt euphoric joy of altitude and a consuming love of beauty. But now that I have understood that, I also understand the second half of the poem. We are not meant to live in ecstasy. We cannot live by awe struck contemplation of beauty. We must return to the world. It is a gift that we make ourselves, to make our minds into mansions that will carry these lovely forms for the rest of our days. Even should I never return here, this is where I first heard the “still, sad music of humanity.”

Damnit, it has taken six years to understand this. And I think now this is the reason I came here - to learn this. I get it now. I see now.

So I owe a debt to Wordsworth . And I owe a debt most of all to herself – she who is sometimes my teacher and who is always on the verge. For them I have only blessings and for her I have no words.

I have to leave this place soon. I do so without regret. I take this with me – the air and the sound of the wind in Alma, thunderstorms above the sand dunes, and above all I take Kenosha pass and South Park, running south from the rounded peaks, running straight out of sight.

2002-10-19T14:25:00.000-04:00

Remember the kids who never read the text? They just read the Cliffs notes, or, for the critically discriminating, the BloomsNotes. Yeah, those kids. Their attention span kept getting shorter and shorter until they had no choice but to become marketing executives. a 'blogger has finally come up with the perfect medium for their enjoyment of literary classics - thanks to the nefarious engine of cognitive reduction that is PowerPoint.

2002-10-13T19:21:00.000-04:00

So, there developed a corporate culture of hiding information. Using information to mask certain facts and to highlight others. There developed rhetoric of information. A fact wasn’t an occurrence in reality as much as it was a point of interpretation – a location for endless positioning. You could measure performance with three items of data and present a number of different scenarios and do so convincingly. You could make your partners believe once set, your governing body of stakeholders believe another. Yet the leadership held the cards and renamed them as it needed. The seven of swords was the three of cups all along. The Moon, it was the Tower.

But it doesn’t always work like that. For the hierophants at the top to interpret the holy mysteries, they need the temple staff to gather the sacrifices. It is the men and women that have brought in the grain and the boiled the water that know the truth. And they listen when the oracle is pronounced. The attendants and aides hear the brilliant greaves shifting uncomfortably in the halls outside. The spears gleaming like spun tungsten – they catch the last light of day at their very tips – going and gone. Those who work this temple’s guts know what has been handed down and the first light will see these men on the sea, headed for a distant city in the east – somewhere that, when they were children, they heard was the end of the world.

How many people will die from willful misreadings?

2002-10-11T02:07:00.000-04:00

Not entirely completed in one day, but for the most part, the transition is finished. I will start making regular back-ups of this template so I do not have to do this on a quarterly basis. Don't get me wrong. I like recursive tasks as much as the next American Worker. I just prefer to change the content rather than the template. Alas, Alack. Tomorrow - hopefully something substantive.

2002-10-10T16:15:00.000-04:00

Ahh..better . Extraneous Archive tags and Post Number tags. Who uses those anyway? Tonight I will drop in the entnation tags for commenting (I enjoy giving you the illusion of feedback) as well as redoing the side links area. What is a hobby but an endless source of constructive frustration? Some prefer Absinthe.

2002-10-10T02:01:00.000-04:00

Why yes - this is a new look. While trying to find that annoying open bracket by the date header, I ended up changing the entire template for my weblog (long story). This has resulted in a much less...hmmm...robust look and handling. Not to mention the fact that I still have the annoying open tag somewhere. Ahh well, it's late and I really could work on this all night. Best to start over tomorrow am. So, as they say "Good night Weblog. I'll most likely kill you in the morning."

2002-10-09T21:12:00.000-04:00

With the demise of Arts & Letters Daily, a wonderful site passes into the ether of expired websites. I commend the proprietors for making an announcement on their page. It could have become one of the rusting hulks of the internet. Among other sites, they recommend the eerily familiar (and I'm guessing eerily familial) Philosophy and Literature for getting your essay fix.

AL Daily made Qwest bearable. It will be missed.

2002-10-08T10:06:00.000-04:00

Have some time on your hands for research? These people did.

Though I have yet to make a dent in it, I find the 1979-2000 section fascinating.

2002-10-05T14:56:00.000-04:00

Sweet Christmas! What is going on in Maryland?

2002-10-02T17:07:00.000-04:00

And now for something we hope you really like...yet more lovely flash.

2002-10-02T16:57:00.000-04:00

Must...not...beat...dead...horse of...illegality...of...current...president...loosing...consciousness...(passes out)

2002-10-01T22:44:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend, at party, some friends came up with a game in which you substitute all instances of the words "child," "Children," "kids," etc., in a colloquial phrase with the word "robot(s)." I won with the sage advice, "spare the rod, spoil the robot."

2002-09-30T15:54:00.000-04:00

Okay - until just now, I had not realized that television news, with it's wholesale adoption of bottom aligned news-tickers, side bars, etc. was now beginning to more closely resemble to a four -color comic.

2002-09-29T17:05:00.000-04:00

I would love to see this list. That would explain the new difficulties faced by American citizens coincidentally named "Gerhard Schroeder." This is an example of the abuse of bureaucratic inertia by an administration with an axe to grind against activists. What happens when we actually catch the in the act of lying. The perfidy of this administration descends from the top down.

And in international news from Bizzaro World, Ted Rall brings us up to date on he ongoing efforts of the UN to end the tyrrany and destabilizing influence of the United States of America. Wait...that's not Bizarro World...

In actual good news, Google is apparently observing its fourth birthday today. The addition of the News tab continues Google's march towards world domination. Happy Birthday.

2002-09-26T10:10:00.000-04:00

I don't belive everything in this analysis, but it's a good start. It has several limitations. It only has space to gloss over oil interests and their role in the current fiasco. The article is also somewhat old fashioned in looking at the history of the last fifty years as the stage on which only nations move. It cannot grapple with increasingly global capital and its rise, coincidental with that of the American Empire.

Despite these facts, it's an interesting overview of how we have come to the brink of war, a war in which the US will act as the aggressor. I would not wince so much if I didn't believe the characterizations of the American electorate as indifferent (even to its own disenfrachisement!) weren't accurate.

2002-09-25T16:26:00.000-04:00

After hearing only the brief media summary of the incident, I wanted to find the actual quote. My favorite part is not the statement itself:
" 'Bush wants to divert attention from domestic political problems. It's a method that is sometimes favoured. Hitler also did that,' she said, according to a report by the Schwaebisches Tagblatt newspaper."

My favorite part is the appositive phrase in the clarification:
" 'I am surprised by this article because it is erroneous and inflammatory to imply that I compared a man who was democratically elected, the American President George W. Bush, and the Nazi era,' her statement said."

The fact that the author felt the need to clarify which leader was "democratically elected" amuses me to no end. Still, at this rate, how long before there is a call for a regime change in Berlin?

2002-09-25T11:08:00.000-04:00

Best. Animation. Ever. Link via Metafilter.

2002-09-24T11:12:00.000-04:00

An brief explanation of the War on the Electorate that has been going on for years. This description paints the slow collision of late capital and government in rather monlithic tones while the real picture has much more subtlety. We have to view the last presidential election as an accidentally too evident piece of the game going on now. With the stakes so high and the margins so close, all pressure was brought to bear on a fulcrum that was already weighted to one side at the outset. Of course it broke. Everything else has been about distracting us from the fact that, just as more and more of the world is holding the American people responsible or the actions of the American government, the American government is busy disenfranchising the American people.

2002-09-23T09:37:00.000-04:00

It's funny because it's true. Link via the ever excellent Textism.

2002-09-21T16:43:00.000-04:00

The only way in which I have yet excelled at Archery. More charming flash games.

2002-09-21T16:33:00.000-04:00

Beautiful. I just learned of this artist this week. I am very taken with his work. I find it quite amazing - crticism as it should be practised - as an art form.

This discovery has been the chief redeemer of a rather horendous week. Aside from a my conversations with J., the other positive aspect of the last week was that Thursday was indeed International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Arrrrrrr. Thar be good.

2002-09-16T19:20:00.000-04:00

I must report this with a certain amount of glee. Now, Bush the Younger may not get the chance to avenge his father's ghost. He may have to look elsewhere to get his war on.

This administration has been trying to make itself look credible while acting as a cheerleader for war. If he insists that there still must be a regime change, and pushes forward with an effort to invade Iraq, his contention that this is part of a war on terror loses more and more substance. He will have to admit that this may be a war on cheap oil, a war that will induce terror, a war that will create an axis of evil, a war on the American electorate, but it is not part of a war on terror.

The Pentagon and the intelligence communities have a number of offices that only think of contingencies - great chains of causality linked from central subjunctive hubs. We know they are aware of what Israel will do if attacked - what Pakistani militants will do when we invade Iraq, and in what precarious shape the House of Saud still stands. We know that Al Quaida will have more incentive to strike at the US. We must assume that despite this, there is some objective that is so valuable to Bush and his corporate sponsors that it is worth the risk of the invasion.

Cynical? You bet. Why? Because this administration has been the most secretive and parochial in history. They have sunk to meet my expectations.

2002-09-12T18:54:00.000-04:00

Damn. "His hair was perfect."

2002-09-11T12:56:00.000-04:00

Permission. Requiem.

2002-09-07T23:19:00.000-04:00

On Cheyenne

I-25 from Denver to Cheyenne seems to encourage speeding like few other stretches of road do. As Ian Frazier would point out: the great plains is an area that we would rather fly over, and if we can’t fly over – we’ll fly through. But by flying through, we do not pay attention – we do not notice a thousand things that should hold our attention, but go unnoticed at ninety miles an hour. And sometimes, it is not just a rock formation jutting up from the rolling floor of the great plains. Sometimes, we fly through things that make the heart ache for love of beauty once we see them – sometimes we fly past lessons of the old masters re-enacted for us if we only pay attention.

It takes a while to get out of Denver. You travel north out of the city through the northern suburbs: Northglenn, Commerce City, and Thornton. You tacitly negotiate with the truckers for space on the road to Greeley. You fly past a few farms on 160th Street. Your mind wanders a few miles off the exits to such exotic locations as Ft. Lupton. But you still drive. You drive past Johnstown, the truck stop and flea market at Johnston’s Corner (which sells a thousand cinnamon rolls a day), and the sprawl of ft. Collins. Within about eight-miles, you have passed outside of the chain of cities that occupy Colorado’s Front Range –cities that look to the mountains and take their measure against their proximity to them.

As a side note, Denver is actually almost in the middle of the width of the state on an east –west axis, but it is actually a little closer to the Wyoming border than the New Mexico border. I have to confess a little disappointment upon first learning that. We are still closer to Mexico, however, than we are to Canada.

So, lucky traveler, you have made it past the enormous Budweiser bottling facility at Fort Collins. You are now 30 miles or so from the Colorado-Wyoming Border. The land that pulls at the seam of I-25 on either side rolls away more dramatically. It seems like an earthquake arrested in a split second. Massive tides of earth roll towards the mountains. Pale gold grass rides the earthen wave. Towards the west, stand the mountains. Towards the east, the straightest county roads in the hemisphere run out toward the horizon where they vanish. You can watch dust settle from old trucks that ply those routes.

Towards the northeast, you can see a wind-farm. Giant white windmills turn in the winds. This is not the slow deliberate turn of a windmill pulling water from a well or actuating a mechanism in the low countries. These turn in a wind that, if you wanted to personify it and attribute to it a regard for humanity, you could only say that is practices a salutary neglect for humanity. On the good days. The turbines spin quickly in the wind.

And the wind moves between the earth and the sky – the medium in which the two communicate. The sky I cannot describe in just an instant because here it is ten thousand skies in a day. The hues of blue change. The crystalline air seems to shatter light into the most beautiful white you’ve ever see. Clouds race through the sky at impossible speeds. Above you and around you a roaring never stops. It is the sound of the sky. It is the sound of an indifferent world that towers over us. It would make me uneasy and delirious, all at once, were I to leave the shelter of my car and walk under this sky.

Off the sides of the highway, you can see a few farms – very little livestock. Or at least, very little close to the highway. The only reason that you realize that they indeed attempt to farm the land lies in the barbed wire fences that seem like some kind of Euclidean joke on the landscape. Which might actually amuse you if you thought the landscape cared.

But as we drive through this area, there is indeed human life. The lone trucks, cars and school busses that tear down the county roads, kicking up signatures in the dusty that you can read twenty miles away. The distant farms and the far flung farm houses in whose upper floors, you might see a window open and a white curtain flitting in and out the open window.

It is here that we realize that life continues. People go on about their lives in all their endless enthusiasms, terrors, and simple ambivalences. Farmers harvest crops. Ranchers put up yet another barbed wire fence perhaps for no other reason than their grandfather had on in this place. For no other reason than their grandfather built fences like others say the rosary . People obey tradition and deviate from all their inherited history here on the plains, under the wide and sheltering sky.

While they go about living and dying (“at last, too soon”) , the sky and plains continue in their indifferent glory. When we describe a landscape as sublime, we make a comment on its attitude toward humanity, not just its power. A sublime landscape builds in the mind the realization of grandeur that is absolutely indifferent to humanity. It bears us no malice (and power with malice is pettiness, tyranny) because it takes no notice of us. We begin to suspect greater hands in the universe than our own when we see such landscapes

Watching people’s live roll out under a sky that could be the path of leviathans unknown has bittersweet taste. It is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus in romantic caricature. The indifferent and painfully beautiful world continues as we plummet into the ocean. We see the American sublime playing out before us . Edward Hopper and Bruegel meet in the voice of the whirlwind that roars over the American plains.

2002-09-02T23:39:00.000-04:00

Returned from a weekend in beautiful Charm City. Educational in the way that all travel is - you learn about yourself. More later. Goodnight all.

2002-08-29T23:55:00.000-04:00

Absent for quite a while now - see Qwest fiasco below. Also, I feel the surf on my heels more than ever. Oddysseus longs for the sleek black prowed ships that will take him to the rocky shores of Ithaca in 20 years.

Tomorrow, I go to Baltimore to see the beloved and to dliver to her the cats - domestic overlords to watch over her. Overly familiar familiars if you will.

I hope to get back to a locale with frequent access to an internet connection that is not work soon. I will update with greater frequency. I have to say that absence makes the heart more locqacious. I've written more letters in three days than in the last three years. Sad that. I will resolve to converse more in longhand.

2002-08-24T19:04:00.000-04:00

Ahh Qwest. I have actually had no difficulties with Qwest until just now. Since I am moving in a few days, I asked that they disconnect my DSL starting on the day that I have vacated my apartment - September 1. I lost my DSL service on Wednesday of this week. Given that I am packing up my pc tonight, it ultimately matters very little. Internet access has become one of those things that I find it very difficult to do without. It simply seems to make things easier. Perhaps I am gimpy. Perhaps I am addicted. Perhaps I just resent having to go to work to update my 'blog. To which I am addicted.

The good news is that I will re-install the 56K modem for dial-up access for the absent beloved when she receives the computer. I will use the oddpost account (see just below) for e-mail from work and Trillian (Screw AOL!) for chat (across multiple platforms). The cell phone will travel. Now if only I could keep the cats here too.

2002-08-24T18:56:00.000-04:00

Screw Hotmail!I really like this web-based e-mail client - not least of all because it features the most amusing and charming customer service blog (or is that the only customer service blog) ever.

2002-08-22T01:13:00.000-04:00

One of the rougher aspects of saving undeveloped rolls of film until right before you move: You suddenly have further proof that you have the greatest friends in the world.

2002-08-20T09:13:00.000-04:00

I have seen the kernel of this item previously. Frightening for all the wrong reasons, really...

2002-08-19T15:11:00.000-04:00

"The sun shines down
over my town
but it never shines
on my face."
Lucinda Williams, "Sharp Cutting Wings"

or, more succinctly,

"Ain't no sunshine when she's gone." - Al Green

2002-08-15T10:47:00.000-04:00

John Ashcroft's dream for America - via Metafilter. He remains the man who most threatens American's Freedoms and who is most responsible for the extrordinarily parochial tone of this administration. By November of 2004 we will be quite tired of being told that the government knows what's best for us and that our democratically expressed opinions do not matter. Fianlly, our own privacy is forfeit, while an impenetrale curtain has fallen over the machinations of the administration.

2002-08-14T21:56:00.000-04:00

Now this is what more of the web should be doing:explixating public discourse. Links via Metafilter.