sueño contigo

A New Website

2011-01-03T15:10:00.000-06:00

I know its been a long time since I've written anything here, but I'm working on a new project that I'd like you guys to know about. Its a kind of social network, but a small more personal one rife with features and functionality, which I hope an online community will one day call home. The ideals that I hope it will be based on are quite similar to what I know sueno contigo's to be. I want it to be a place for dialogue on a range of issues that are important and pertinent to our lives, whether they are global or immediately personal. I want it to be a place where people can share the parts of themselves they find the most important. In most day to day circumstances we don't get the chance to share what matters to us the most, what we really love and enjoy, and what we pour our time and efforts into. I want it to be a place where every member feels they've gained or learned something from others they wouldn't have on their own.

Right now the site is still in development. If anyone here is interested on working on it with me, I'd be happy to partner with you and include you as an administrator of the site. Otherwise, right now we need to fill the site with quality content and dialogue, so once we start promoting the site and showing it to new people they'll see what we're all about and know that there's already an active community forming. If you'd like to sign in and post/upload some material, I'd greatly appreciate it, or even if you'd like me to send you an email once the site is fully launched and operational I'd be happy to do that. You could even copy & paste some old sueno contigo entries to the blog section if you'd like. Here's the site, I hope you enjoy it.

Eclipse Eclipsed

2010-12-21T02:39:00.000-06:00

I've been out to my extended backyard several times this break: first alone, in the afternoon; then with Alex, at sunset; then finally tonight, at 1. It seemed inappropriate to allow the solstice to go by unrecognized, but what got me out there was the promise of a lunar eclipse. Of course, I knew there would be no lunar eclipse or even a single star, given the thick gray blanket of clouds keeping the Earth's warmth in and the cold of the Universe out. I'll admit, then, that what really rousted me from at 1 this morning was my reading material: Gordon Hempton's One Square Inch of Silence. Or rather, the memory that book returned me to of the remarkable impression of meeting the man himself, and hearing him tell much of the beginning of the book in person.

Hastily bundled and out the door, the fear of nighttime brings me to a standstill as soon as I leave the parking lot. It'd been an unfortunate while since I'd been out this late, this alone. This place is quite a different place with the visage and psychology of late night on the solstice. Everything is bright, since the lens of pollution from Cass City is endlessly reflected among the clouds and the snow. But the light is wrong, brings no comfort, carries no color.

Getting further away from home, into the field, the first stark trees hit my peripheral vision and brittle stalks grab my ankles. Freeze. My heart imagines it's helping, preparing me for a tither. I stop, and I listen: a traditional, time-tested and time-honored (there is no way to convey the nature of what TIME means in those phrases) method for sounding out danger. And after all, this is why I am hear: to teach myself, or just allow myself to listen. There is nothing; Seeger Street to the far West rumbles like a strong gust of wind. The true wind is imperceptible now.

More steps forward. There is a new horizon in the prarie now: A and E and B and now a foot of snow and a crusty shield on top. Every step breaks the ice, ruins the relief, and leaves my indelible mark on tonight's winter. For the same reason, the field is now quite a lot more alive than ever it was before: my previous walks occurred before the snow and as it first fell. Now I cannot go more than three feet without meeting a deer or what I take to be a rabbit who passed through the place recently. The deer leave deep but very constricted holes; what I take for a rabbit, a shallow, solid stripe punctuated by small paws. I myself leave gaping wounds in the shell, a foot long and as deep. I am literally crashing through the place. Far less rude is my trespass, however, than that of the snowmobile.

A bird, to the left. At this time of night? Odd. I stop to listen. Nothing, and after a time, I resume, crashing towards the forest. My fear is gone, but as I reach the forest and an adopted tree stand, it returns: the forest provides the antidote for the sickly glow of clouds and field. It consumes the light, in a sense, and its visage is appropriate for such a fiend: stark, angular claws line the horizon, and towards the ground all sense disappears in a foggy haze. I dare not enter at night (the undergrowth is unmanageable, and the ground is speckled with puddles I could easily end up in). The bird again - and now some hooligans, enjoying . . . a pond? Perhaps not. I climb the tree stand, sweep off the snow and acknowledge the ice, and begin to listen for that bird. . . I hear something, turn swiftly to the left, and hear it - shit. The "bird" is a high-pitched whistle something in my head does very faintly every time I turn it swiftly to the left. I do so several times to confirm the hypothesis.

Then I do hear a bird - a brusque call from an owl in the forest. To whom is that owl communicating, and what does it wish to say? Listening to the land seems to be much like listening to music, though I have of course much more experience deciphering the latter. In both, however, the message and the medium are both in foreign tongues - what you hear in natural silence and in a piece of music are both intuitively meaningful, but the language of their meanings remains inscrutable even once you've deciphered the language of their symbology. In both cases, the languages are quite real, despite what little credit for existence they have been given by arrogant people. It is particularly incredible that we are now realizing (or returning to know) the extent to which acoustic communication is crucial in ecosystems, not only among species but between them.

I sit on my hands to keep the ice on the treestand from melting through to my ass. This works, but my hands are cold. I hear nothing after not waiting long enough to hear it, and head home. I follow a snowmobile trail to the corn field that, unbeknownst to me, has always ran from the forest all the way back to my house, perhaps 1500 ft. I find the high edge of a furrow and balance-beam my way home.

Fake Freshman Studies Curricula

2010-03-17T21:07:00.001-06:00

Hey everyone,

Now that we're finally done with real Freshman Studies, I thought it would be an interesting idea to see what some of us might do if we were given the chance to design Freshman Studies curricula ourselves. The works you pick should be things that aren't already on the Freshman Studies list, they should be as diverse as the official list, but not necessarily in the same way. You should pick things not just because you like them or would want to share them with students, but because they'd actually teach students something widely applicable. The "message" or "teaching" students are supposed to get from your work should be suitably non-traditional. You should definitely flaunt the guidelines any legitimate institution would impose, and you should by all means include joke entries. You are encouraged to give your reasoning for including the works you did, but don't feel obliged to. These things are generally obvious anyway; unless people are unfamiliar with the works (and hopefully we are - if not, you'ren't being creative and esoteric enough!).

My list:
Essays 1-3 of Pragmatism, by William James - James provides the most helpful and basic values for philosophical discourse out there. Should be good fodder for discussion itself, as well.

Select poems by Billy Collins - Accessible poetry about interesting things.

Deloused in the Comatorium, by the Mars Volta - Very talented musicians who create really innovative art by combining many traditions and idioms. Deals with serious metaphysical and social issues in a very creative and genuine way.

Collapse, by Jared Diamond - Shows with vivid, clear, scientific metaphor the way humanity is about to kill itself. Vital knowledge for everyone to possess, when they will soon be putting themselves in positions of power and influence in society.

Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott - Introduces multi-dimensionality to students who (unless they've had decent educations like most of my fellow Lawrentians did) have never experienced it before. It's also extremely well-written and a hell of a lot of fun.

Amelie - Beautiful and very creative exploration of important themes in social relationships and personal life.

The City of Dreaming Books, by Walter Moers - Exemplary playfulness with language and with a whole slew of creative ideas - maybe not the most traditional ideas for "academic discourse." Also the most fun, and very well written.

Select stories by Donald Barthelme - Very droll, funny post-modern fiction, in the style of Borges and Kafka.

Bata Ketu, by Michael Spiro et al - Combines a variety of world music traditions to make a very catchy and poppy album without sacrificing authenticity.

Arctic Dreams, by Barry Lopez - Gives the most beautiful sense of the vastness and complexity of the world. This is a vital attitude for college students and everyone else to have.

I've tried to only pick things that are models of aesthetic style (primarily in writing), present obvious, important "messages," and are a LOT of fun.

Love,
Adam

Evan Bayh Op-Ed

2010-02-20T19:46:00.002-06:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/opinion/21bayh.html?pagewanted=1&hp

I think he's absolutely right.

2010-01-24T14:49:00.002-06:00

“The bear's melancholy wandering, for example, is underscored in a Polar Eskimo story about a bear who falls in love ith a young married woman. He cautions her never to tell her husband of their meetings because her husband will surely try to kill him. But she takes pity on her husband's failures in hunting bears and tells him where her lover lives. Far away, the bear hears her whispering to her husband in the night, and he leaves his home before the husband arrives. He goes straight to the woman's snow house. He raises his paws to smash it in—and then he lowers his paws to his side. Feeling betrayed, overcome with grief, he sets off on a long and solitary journey.

To the European mind the story is poignant. For the Eskimo it is charged with danger. For the bear to go off preoccupied with such a subject means it will not be paying attention to where it is going, that it may fall through bad ice or miss signs that will lead it to an aglu and sustenance.”

Barry Lopez, Chapter 3, Tornarssuk, p. 114, “Arctic Dreams”

Quick summery/first draft for a piece called 'Regrets'

2010-01-03T22:49:00.000-06:00

In a relationship there is a beginning. It maybe simple and forgettable, but it is there and it doesn't matter. Their hair might have been long, short, or beautiful and in the end that too shall fade. Their face and the way they say hello will be boiled down into a feeling. Which will spread every time you recall the first kiss and the walk through the woods. this feeling will not be the sum of the relationship. It will not be the spark felt when they first made you laugh and it will not be the torn heart you can't get over. This feeling will be the taint of regrets spreading unstoppable.

That time that you made icecream will now only be though of in terms of what you did wrong and what you should have done. Everything will seem clear. You will know that you both made mistakes, but you will only suffer for the mistakes you made.

This burden will build with each new smile from your current love and will bind your tongue. One day someone will come along who decides that they can fix you. They will fail. There will be no moment where the past fades leaving only the present. Their love which will be based on your recovery will collapse leaving only the control freak within. And as they leave seemingly taking all that you had left, you will break.

The burden of your life will drown you. You may commit suicide, but probably not. You care too much about the world. As you sit broken and crying in the bottom of your shower you will be reborn. This will be though a realization that your don't give a fuck and that life is too great to waste.

You will be alone for longer than you previously thought possible.

Those memories of being held and cooking together will be there, but now your life will be focused on the present, this moment. You will see the colors of the trees like never before. And the smell of the earth as you work your garden will almost overwhelm you. It is then that you will walk into their life and they into your's.

Individuals playing the part. You will not do everthing together and more than likely will not truly love eachother for a long time. But it will not be until this point, this moment, that you can truly say you have no regrets.

My Two Essays for Marlboro College

2009-12-28T01:38:00.002-06:00

The first is my personal statement, in which I respond to the prompt: "Write a personal statement about who you are, how you think, what you value, and what issues and ideas interest you the most. Also tell us how your interest in Marlboro developed and how attending Marlboro College fits into your overall goals."

A Personal Statement for Marlboro College

From the moment I discovered Marlboro College it has held a distinct appeal for me. Even the aspects that may commonly scare prospective students away, from its secluded location to its small size, are attractive: I can't wait to get out of the suburbs and closer to nature, and Malboro College seems as close to the middle of “nowhere” as any college I've considered. Of course, what really draws me to the college is the character of its program: I am looking for academic intensity and intellectual seriousness. Marlboro College appears to be the school that will challenge and empower me to translate what I've learned so far - and doubtlessly the much greater amount I still have to learn - into the foundation I need to accomplish my long-term goals.

I graduated from Cass City High School in 2006, a small public high school in the very rural and conservative heart of the thumb of Michigan. While there were some positive exceptions, I consider most of my schooling there an overall detriment to my education. For various reasons I left the school disillusioned with the role of public schools and skeptical of the notion of “higher education.” My high school transcript is not particularly impressive, however this was and is not so much a reflection of my capacity for learning as it is of the boredom and apathy induced by the atmosphere and academics of Cass City High School, and much less is it a reflection of my desire to learn, which is stronger than ever.

I'd like to think a more important education began for me upon graduation. Almost immediately I started reading voraciously, and within a year I absorbed several dozen works of natural and social philosophy and science. During this period I developed or adopted many positions and beliefs on a range of contemporary problems, and have spent much of my time since writing and further enhancing my understanding of the philosophies and theories behind major social, political, economic, and ecological ideas. While my primary interest has been in political philosophy, I have also read many popular science books on evolutionary biology, anthropology, linguistics, astronomy, human ecology, and physics (which is my current niche of exploration). I am also beginning to introduce myself to subjects I have mostly neglected, including cultural studies, language, sociology, mathematics, computer science, and psychology.

My wide reading has inspired in me many reflections on the human condition, and has caused me to at least question and at best discard many underlying assumptions which I used to take for granted. While I am not nearly as ideologically hot-tempered as I used to be I still operate on the conviction that modern industrial civilization has been organized along lines that are ecologically unsustainable, socially stratifying, and politically and economically unjust. While the world's resources are carelessly depleted; while its wondrous and essential biodiversity is being erased; and while a significant portion of its populations starve or lack (or are kept from) the means to improve their lives, the wealthiest nations thoughtlessly embrace, or at best placidly tolerate, mindless consumer culture, the resurgences of jingoistic nationalism and corrupted religions, hollow social relations, junk popular science, and a polity that is increasingly dominated by the influences of business and finance.

Such is my take on the world as I see it, and my academic plans extend from these thoughts. I feel many of the problems we face today are worsened by a failing public discourse. So it is my ambition to use my new-found talents and understanding, achieved through the rigor of the Marlboro College program, to be a popularizer of knowledge in the tradition of Carl Sagan or Will Durant. I want to come away from Marlboro College in a position both to contribute to my field of study and to improve the public understanding of its subject matter, especially where it is socially relevant.

Though my independent study has been consistently invigorating, it has also been sporadic and somewhat unfocused, and has surely lacked elements that are crucial to a proper, effective education. This realization is what first brought me to the college search in the summer of 2009. Still feeling sour toward major academic institutions, I decided to search out small liberal arts colleges. Thanks to the advice of a friend's father, I happened upon Loren Pope's Colleges That Change Lives and, subsequently, Marlboro College. It advertised what immediately stuck out as precisely the type of program and environment I wanted to immerse myself in, and that feeling has only intensified as I have read more about the college. I hope to use the Marlboro College experience to coalesce my many fragmented ideas into a proper thesis (or several), and to build the skills I need to make any lasting contributions I can to the advancement of public knowledge and understanding, and by extension the realization of a freer, more just, and more sustainable society.

Next is my "expository writing sample," which is a straightforward analytical essay. It sums up my understanding of the process and role of the US media system. They say that they are looking for something which demonstrates my "social consciousness" so I thought the topic was appropriate, as well as happening to fall within my specialty. It is largely theoretical, and contains no case studies or real-world examples, as I felt they would lopside the essay too much, but perhaps I'm wrong. Also, the title is far too academic sounding and in that way may sound a bit presumptuous. Anyway:

The Social Cost of Market-Based News Dissemination in America

“Information is the currency of democracy” - Thomas Jefferson

Today more than ever the mass news media maintains a significant pressure on, and in certain situations entirely shapes, public discourse in America. It ceaselessly informs the opinions of ordinary Americans on a great variety of issues, from wars and financial crises to fashion and Hollywood gossip. As people become further removed from the realities of modern life – from increasingly esoteric scientific discoveries to the towering complexities and obfuscations of government decision-making – it has become necessary to examine more critically the mechanisms which relay information from the heights of academia and government to the everyday sensibilities of working Americans. Ideally, these mechanisms would operate in a way that enhances public knowledge and democratic and economic participation, contributing to the public interest. These mechanisms exist predominantly as businesses that compete with each other in the market for profit, and it turns out the costs of doing business – the exchanging of audiences for sponsorship – can have significant social consequences.

In a process that began in the nineteenth century with the advent of telegraphy and photography, and that exploded in the latter half of the twentieth, television broadcasting has replaced printed media and radio as the prevailing format of news dissemination in America. According to a poll conducted by the National Science Foundation in 2001, 53 percent of Americans rely primarily on television for their news, while newspaper readers make up only 29 percent of those polled. The shift from print media to electronic media has had a broadly negative impact, warns Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, on public knowledge and discourse in America. Postman argues that television as a media format – as opposed to books or early newspapers - is innately biased toward entertainment values, regardless of the type of program or content aired. He points out that any commercially successful model of television programming “offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend... and is largely aimed at emotional gratification.” He argues that if this model is the most successful in attracting viewers in general, and consequently (and consequentially) the advertisers that follow them, then even news programs must emulate it in order to secure the advertisers' sponsorship. This has meant the cutting of lengthy exposition, contextual analysis, and continuity of content from news programs in an attempt to make them more palatable to a perceived fickle consumer audience. He calls the information that is left over from this process disinformation, and he explains that this is not false information – as might be expected from the propaganda apparatus of a totalitarian state – but “misleading information – misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information – information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.” What results is a necessarily distorted picture of the world, which is presented to the viewing (and voting) public as truth.

This problem is significantly expanded in the case of televised analysis and debate. Postman writes that “in part because television sells its time in seconds and minutes, in part because television must use images rather than words, in part because its audience can move freely to and from the television set, programs are structured so that almost each eight-minute segment may stand as a complete event in itself.” Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky extend this thought in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, explaining that “the technical structure of the media virtually compels adherence to conventional thoughts; nothing else can be expressed between two commercials... without the appearance of absurdity that is difficult to avoid when one is challenging familiar doctrine with no opportunity to develop facts or argument.” In this way the absence of exposition, context, and continuity has the effect of naturally shedding fringe and alternative viewpoints from televised discourse. It also serves to shut out dissenting voices from the dominating avenue of information dissemination, leaving only those that stick closer to traditional or more “moderate” lines of thought.

This is echoed in the central thesis of Herman and Chomsky's book, in which they establish a theoretical set of naturally emerging “filters” that determine de facto newsworthiness. When views and analyses that meaningfully challenge the status quo are denied access to the major channels of information flow for most Americans, they argue, the news media inadvertently end up serving elite and corporate interests. This is not the result of a conspiracy on the part of an interested class, they go on, but is largely an “outcome of the workings of market forces.” These “market forces” are the result of the advertising-dependent business model that dominates large media firms. In 2003, newspapers received on average 80% of their revenues by selling print space to advertisers, while virtually all of the revenue earned by television and radio broadcasters was through advertising. Herman and Chomsky write that “with advertising, the free market does not yield a neutral system in which final buyer choice decides. The advertisers' choices influence media prosperity and survival.” It turns out that “in essence, the private media are major corporations selling a product (readers and audiences) to other businesses (advertisers).” When a news program or network carries subject matter that may be construed as politically radical or harmful to the national interest, or one that considers social perspectives and worldviews that are too far from established societal norms, it risks losing the essential support of its sponsors to other networks and programs that more strictly filter their content. What is left is a situation in which news media companies must decide between presenting a genuine variety of views and analyses on any pertinent but controversial topic or maintaining their competitiveness as mediums for advertisement, and thus their profitability and survival as businesses. The public is then left without ready access to a great deal of relevant information that would enable them to critically observe and affect the actions of their government.

In order to actively participate in - or even to effectively observe - government decision-making, citizens require a genuine range of views and analyses, lest only established or traditional doctrines prevail. It has long been assumed that free access to information is a cornerstone of healthy democracies. As Thomas Ferguson explains in The Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money Driven Political Systems, “to effectively control governments, ordinary voters require strong channels that directly facilitate mass deliberation and expression.” When economic realities constrict the dominant channels of deliberation and expression, citizens must expend considerable effort in order to obtain the information that does not make it through the news media filters, whether by seeking out alternative perspectives on the Internet or in independent magazines and newspapers. This leads to less political participation on the part of working Americans, as "even highly motivated voters face comparatively enormous costs when they attempt to acquire, evaluate, and act upon political information." Consequently, Ferguson argues, this has tended toward more political participation on the part of businesses, whose costs of gathering and acting on information are comparatively low - especially when weighed against the potential benefits of influence over political processes. Ordinary Americans are left behind as power shifts to corporations, which have now come to enjoy supreme influence over the outcomes of elections, concludes Ferguson. If we are to take democracy – of, by, and for the people - as a desirable mode of government, then it follows that the resulting gap in political influence, partially a consequence of uneven access to information, between ordinary citizens and corporations is detrimental to American democracy.

These effects represent a significant market failure – a situation in which the free market has produced an inefficient and socially undesirable effect. Whenever public awareness and understanding of social, political, economic, and ecological problems is limited as a result of natural market processes, a significant social cost has been incurred, one which reduces the public's capacity for meaningful participation in democratic processes. At its worst, the resulting situation is a severe asymmetry of information between social classes and a deficit of democracy. As in other examples of market failure – the most recognized being climate change as a result of unchecked industrial activity – reforms or the development of viable alternatives to the major news media have become necessary to ensure equal access to information amongst private citizens, and by extension the healthy functioning of democracy in America.

Let me know what one thinks. Any glaring errors? Considering that I have not attended college yet and most every contributor to this blog has, lemme know if you think these are what a small liberal arts college may be looking for. Thanksss.

Sojourns - Journal, Memory, Land

2009-12-19T14:44:00.000-06:00

From Sojourns Magazine, winter/spring '09 issue

Times I Have Seen The Animals

Craig Childs

I was very young when I woke before dawn and grabbed the small knapsack beside the bed. In it I placed a spiral notepad, a sharpened pencil, a paper bag containing breakfast, and a heavy thrift-store tape recorder with grossly oversized buttons. I walked outside, through the neighborhood, and at the edge of a field full of red-winged blackbirds, I took out the tape recorder. Their officious little prattle lifted like shouts from the stock market floor. I pushed record and listened.

In time I moved on; recording birds in different trees, in other lots. I ate cold toast with careful bites. Writing things down: the time, the place, what the bird looked like. My penmanship as shaky, typical for elementary school. I wanted so badly to be able to write like an adult. Occasionally I would just make loops ith the pencil so that it looked like cursive. I worked at the entries, putting the last letter or two of a word on the next line if it wouldn't fit. It was important, as important as anything, and I acted as if I knew what I was doing, as if I knew something about birds. Which I did not. I understood only that they flew and that they did it well. I would hold the pencil in my teeth and hum thoughtfully as I had seen the adults do.

With my tape recorder, I walked these fields fanning below the east side of the Rock Mountains in Colorado. So rarely was I awake at this time of the day that it felt like my birthday or Thanksgiving. I had not known that the sunrise was so lavish and that you could actually feel the color when it reached your face. I had a fantasy of running away to the woods, becoming a nomad and a hermit, but soon enough the sixty minutes of tape ran out. I returned home. . .

Now I go out walking. Sometimes for a hundred miles, circling mountain ranges or following canyons for weeks and months. More often it is a quarter mile in an afternoon shuffling around the trees, looking for a soft place to sit. Out of habit, my eyes train on shapes and movements, and if I see any animal, it is invariably unexpected. I have no idea how proficient trackers do it - choosing their animal, then finding it. I choose a coyote and I get a very rainy day. I choose an elk and get a deer mouse. Then a mountain lion comes from behind while I am crouched, looking at its tracks.

To see the animal, you must first remain very still. You may have to huddle in the dark of a street culvert for three nights before the raccoon comes. you may have to sit naked on the tundra before the grizzly finds you. Or you will simply have to be there, driving the highway the moment that a caravan of unhurried red-backed salamanders passes from one side to the other. That is when you must leave your car and get on hands and knees in the roadway. Just be careful not to touch the salamanders, because the acid from your fingertips will burn into their backs. When you encounter an animal, it may be as startling and quick as the buzz of a rattlesnake. Or you may have time to note the shift of wind and the daily motions of light.

Times that I have seen the animals have been like knife cuts in fabric. Through these stabs I could see a second world. There were stories of evolutions and hunger and death. Cross sections of genetic histories and predator-prey relationships, of lives as cryptic as blood paths in snow. I have talked with those at the Division of Wildlife who know. I have rummaged through clutters of skulls and skeletons in a musty museum basement and read the reports of field biologists. But it is outside where the grip of the story lies.

Ideology

2009-12-18T22:50:00.000-06:00

An issue that has been haunting my thoughts of late is the extent and nature of the power and influence of ideas. I found myself pulled from the idea that "history is made by great individuals, great events, and great ideas," one traditional conception, towards the opposite feeling, by learning of new theories in political science and filling my mind with the idea that everything we know is a product of naturally emergent behaviors and that our understandings of social phenomena need to reflect that.

Watching Golden Rule introduced me to a wholly new and much more satisfying way to understand electoral politics. That is, elections and particularly party politics shouldn't be seen as indicative of the feelings and intellectual or sentimental trends of average voters, but rather as the shifting organization of blocs of investors (i.e., businesses and the wealthy) in conflict over issues of national policy that make a great deal of difference to their own interests. As I still had many questions, I decided to read the book.1 Having now finished the first chapter, I feel ready to phrase these questions.

The overall question here is "What is the relationship between ideas and events in history?"

By ideas, I mean particularly those we think of as profound, progressive, and as having 'shaped the course of history' - e.g., Abolitionism, Marxism, Human Rights, Constitutions, Capitalism, etc. I don't mean to doubt the impact of ideas at all - certainly ideas make a very great deal of difference to each of us individually. However, I want to plumb the character of the interactions between the rise in prevalence of great ideas and the social conditions that surround them (both as causes and effects). It is not a question that has a direct answer, of course, but I'm sure we can arrive at something more insightful and informative than merely writing it off as 'complicated.'

I think the example of Abolitionism will be best suited to our particular group's interests. Alex has in the past cited the abolition of slavery as proof of the progressive enlightenment of humanity's 'moral compass' over time. He argues that the fact that at one time, slavery was both widespread and largely unquestioned morally, and the fact that it is now only an aberration and condemned by the majority of the world indicates that the populace has grown to realize that slavery is wrong. This is certainly true, but the question for us is whether this idea was the impetus for the abolition of slavery, or whether it is a side effect of other trends that more directly led to the abolition of slavery. As Ferguson points out, the business magnates funding abolitionist groups in the years before the Civil War were the grandchildren of men who thought nothing of the fact that ships they owned were bearing slaves to the New World. And indeed, it is hard for me to believe that some trend towards moral tenderness over the millennia made the idea of abolishing slavery, which has undoubtedly been around in some form since slavery began, suddenly direly urgent to the people of the Northern US.

The answer seems to lie in some middle ground. Ideas are somehow inextricable from political movements, but the movements themselves rely on some more concrete economic driving force. Would be interesting to discuss/learn of the ways the progression of the history of ideas has been thus moved and shaped by economics and political science; to see how ideas don't move towards an ever more complex and accurate and interesting form merely by building on the shoulders of their predecessors.

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Footnotes
1. After reading the first chapter of the book, I realized that Ferguson's thesis does not mean that ideologies are not driving forces in politics because they are not capable of doing so, but rather because ideologies are relevant only to real people. The entities driving politics today are profit-seeking bodies investing in politics not to bring about a Utopian state according to any ideology, but rather in order to protect their interests and increase their profits. As Ferguson notes, it is not impossible that the people become major investors in politics, and, in such a situation, the interests of the people would be brought about however they saw fit. This manifestation would presumably correspond to the ideologies of the populace.

Essay

2009-12-18T13:12:00.005-06:00

Ellicottville, New York. October. 2:30 AM.
Two black cats fight in the street next to the Curly-Q Fries buggy. Their bodies heave under the pale streetlights until one cat flees, a dart shot across the courthouse lawn. I’m driving through a small town bisected by a two-lane highway that meanders through western New York. This town is shaped by migrators--the froth of cars on the highway, and the affluent skiers that drift north on cold weekends, pumping blood into the shops at Ellicottville’s center. Tonight, mine is the sole car on the highway, and the skiers will not come for months. The only discernible life here at this hour is a couple standing together in front of the closed, dimly night-lit stores that sell decorative furniture and fleece jackets. The couple stands in strange juxtaposition with the quaint shops and clean, brick streets--the man is fat, wearing all black, and is maybe 30. The woman has bleached blond hair and dark eye makeup. They embrace under the streetlights and glare at my headlights as I pass.

I have sunk into the rhythm of night consciousness. Mozart’s wife used to read to him while he composed so that his occupied senses would not distract him from the music. The motion of the car and the repetitive, dark-engulfed scenery outside have the same effect on me; my thoughts tumble unfiltered as I watch the road. In particular, I am noticing the details I typically miss--the imprints and debris of people’s lives, like the abandoned newspaper by the drainage grate or the path feet have eroded in the courthouse lawn. Oddly, seeing this town without people is a startling reminder that people exist.

As I drive, the quality of Ellicottville’s streetlights evokes the small, Midwestern town where I spent late elementary and middle school, and my memory folds in on itself. I choke on details--the abandoned house on our street, former object of my obsession; how I would sneak into the backyard and squint through its grimy windows at the darkness inside. And the ice cream shop a few streets from my house that provided a succession of vanilla soft-serve with sprinkles on the days it was too hot to play outside. Specifically, Ellicottville’s streetlights reference a night in sixth grade when my parents and I ate dinner at the home of a boy in my class whose stepmom worked with my dad. Our parents were drunk and the boy Keenan and I asked to go out and play in the dark--permission was easily granted. We collected Calvin and James, classmates in the neighborhood, and roamed the October streets, tumbling through backyards, while careful to trespass only in grass belonging to old ladies James knew or to friends of Calvin's parents.

We hid from one another in the damp boxes slumped on curbs for trash pickup and behind the sequences of shrubs that characterize Midwestern college towns. When desperate to be concealed, we folded our bodies into the shadows of houses and cars, breathless and delirious as we waited to be discovered. Once tired of hiding, we dragged ourselves panting through darkened neighborhoods under the yellow-gray light diffusing from streetlights high above our heads. Passing a familiar video store, James pointed to a flagpole next to an illuminated law firm sign in the parking lot. He lowered his voice and shared a secret: while holding the flagpole with one hand, a person, even a small one, could lean forward, touch the metal base of the sign and receive the mildest of electric shocks. He demonstrated and we followed, delighted by the revelation that electricity had slept under our gazes.

Secrets like James’ peppered our lives then. Once, a neighbor ripped up his sidewalk to make a flowerbed, and I dragged my dad’s shovel over to help excavate. Treasures surfaced in the dirt--toy soldiers, a spoon, a child’s bracelet. My neighbor pulled up a caramel-colored marble, polished it on his shirt and handed it to me. It’s glazed wood, he said. An antique. Worth 100 dollars at least. I never checked the fact, but kept the marble in sacred spaces--in my bedpost (home to the yellow, never-inflated balloon that held the hundred dollar bill my uncle gave me at his wedding), in an altoids tin in my sock drawer, and then in a jewelry box decorated with the face of the Virgin that I inherited from my Catholic grandmother. I always knew where the marble was, and I worshiped the mystery of its past. Then, when grass grew over the demolished sidewalk where it had miraculously sprung from the earth, I made a new discovery--the height difference between the grass and the cement of the sidewalk next door formed a sort of ramp, over which I rode my bike continuously all spring and into the summer.

These secrets were my favorite secrets of elementary school. Whispered accounts of first kisses lost potency after their initial rush, but the visceral excitement of James’ flagpole shock reignited each time my dad and I passed the law firm parking lot on our way to rent a video. While the flagpole and sign were too banal to merit a second look from my dad, my chest warmed with privileged knowledge as we passed. In that way, those secrets gave us power. Our parents could differentiate the highways and navigate the class structure of the university in town, but we knew our environment in intricate detail. We could recite what all the graffiti on the dumpsters near our houses said and we knew which trees were best to climb. This was our independence strategy--the details that structured our lives were alien to our parents, and also benign. We could control them ourselves without help or interference.

But my attention returns to Ellicottville when 219 North turns down a residential street, displaying quaint, modest homes and leafy oaks that are beginning to redden in response to early October. Most of the windows are dark, and I notice that I instinctively search for the lights left on. They tend to be at the backs of houses. Small lamps that illuminate swaths of kitchen or living room--a piano, a leather armchair, a knife left on the table by the sink. In one house, muffled light seeps through an upstairs curtain, and I think: bedroom. I imagine the person who might be inside, maybe a victim of fall insomnia like myself, and I immediately understand how far I am from the childish consciousness of elementary school.
Sometime around puberty, our lives became about people, not places or things. Independence meant embracing the adult ethics to which we were becoming attuned. We learned to structure our lives through more nuanced interactions than those with our physical environment. This enriched us in some ways--friendships were no longer simply conspiratorial--but it impoverished us, as well. For children, social formality was dispensable as long as we had apparent good intentions. We didn't know all the rules, and if we did, we broke them. We talked to strangers, walked on neighbors’ properties, picked their flowers, touched their lawn ornaments, but we were earnest. We were curious and vigorous and unselfconscious in our desires. Truly, we were charmed.

Now, far removed from that, I cannot go back. I can only be reminded from time to time, in places like Ellicotville whose night incarnation accentuates the details of physical environment, of what the world seemed through my childhood eyes. But my consciousness is richer now, and in every place I go, I feel a communion with its humanity more than an appreciation for its sights. In Ellicottville, my sympathy is with the strange couple alone on the street and with the few dispersed residents whose curtained lights indicate that they are still awake. I do not lament this change in me, but as I follow 219 North out of town, the reflections of my headlights on the pavement touch the squares of curtained window light spilling onto the highway. It’s a kind of prayer.

A Humble Piece of Reverence Towards Being

2009-12-16T02:53:00.001-06:00

I have for a very long time been intending to express in writing some intuited revelations and feelings about Being, Time, and Awareness. This is that expression. I do not intend for it to advance an argument or prove anything, because the things I have to say have already been well established or are simply self-evident. The point is rather to reflect on several truths that I find terrifically affecting and profound.

My feelings about time were the impetus for this post, so it seems appropriate to begin there. For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by the passing of time. I find it amazing to imagine past moments and future ones, knowing that I will experience them with the same immediacy and vivacity I am living right now. It is somewhat scary to know that the day of your death will arrive just as quickly from this moment as the present did from your childhood. Not that the remainder of your life will even pass terribly quickly, or be any less fulfilling than you hope it to be; the fact that it is true at all that time is inexorable and that there is an end is affective enough in and of itself.

The other idea arose from several quotes I found striking for some reason I didn't quite understand at the time I read them:

"a self-invented word" - as in, a word that invented itself, a word independent of thinkers and writers and, well, inventors of words. I have no idea where I read this.

". . . strange, intimate music which seemed to be submerged in itself, to be listening to itself; . . ." - from Demian, by Hermann Hesse.

These phrases stuck with me, and gained meaning for me as I came to my current superficial understanding of George Berkeley's Idealism. The relevant thesis of this philosophy is that "there are no material objects, only minds and ideas in those minds." That is, existence depends on perception, and it is therefore meaningless to speak of anything as existing when it is not being perceived. As I first grasped this, I recognized its truth as irrefutable but irrelevant. (There is a David Hume quote to that effect, which I can't seem to find at the moment.)

As our Freshman Studies class discussed Kurosawa's film Rashomon, several of my classmates said things to the effect of "What if there is no objective reality?" When put it this way, Berkeley's Immaterialism seems quite invalid. Not logically fallacious, but something that only has meaning within the context of human language and thought and is only true within that context. To say there is no objective reality at all is absurd, since there is obviously something, and subjective things are contingent on some objective thing - the mind itself, if nothing else. Objective reality without subjective perception thereof is easily understood (if not, in deference to Berkeley, logically meaningful or imaginable). And while objective reality may be counter-intuitive in the thick of subjective personal existence, it is quite intuitive in the context of science.

This is the essence of a feeling that I have found to be the most profound and affecting: the illusion of perception or understanding of things-as-they-are, of objective reality. I get this feeling in nature most of all. I find it in the sound of leaves rustled by wind sleeping in a tent at night. Mountains, once they have become vague entities - mere silhouettes - in the twilight, are beings that tangibly flaunt the fact of their Objective Being, the undeniable Fact that they have existed for millions of years quite independent of any perceiving eye. It was partly in search of this feeling that I went to three National Parks over winter break this year.

A more straightforward feeling is "How Strange It Is to Be Anything At All" (from In The Aeroplane Over the Sea). It's something I'm sure we've all felt, but it's worth reflecting on. The fact that an objective Universe, existing unperceived for untold billions of years, developed, through naturally emergent phenomena, beings aware of it subjectively, is unfathomably amazing, for its improbability and for its own innate, ineffable wonder. Lawrence Weschler expresses this much more articulately than I ever could:

"Pop quiz in seventh grade English. The teacher has her class address a simple question in the form of an impromptu essay: What is the purpose of human existence on earth? And she gives the kids fifteen minutes.
She gets a variety of responses, and one of them, from an at-that-time eleven-year-old girl (who, for the purposes of this essay, we will call my daughter, Sara), goes like this:

WHY IS THE HUMAN ON EARTH? I believe that there is, despite the fact that we humans have done so much damage to the world, a reason for our existence on this planet. I think we are here because the universe, with all it’s wonder and balance and logic, needs to be marveled at, and we are the only species (to our knowledge) that has the ability to do so. We are the one species that does not simply except what is around us, but also asks why it is around us, and how it works. We are here because without us here to study it, the amazing complexity of the world would be wasted. And finally, we are here because the universe needs an entity to ask why it is here."
"Wonder and balance and logic, indeed—to which one might add beauty and grace. But all of it—and this is Sara’s crucial insight—all of it is for naught (or at any rate for naught in terms of “wonder” and “balance” and “logic” and “beauty” and “grace”) without the necessarily fragile and puny and utterly contingent human gaze.

Why is there anything, ask the philosophers, with their very first originary question, rather than simply just nothing at all? To which might now be added: And why—however possibly could there be—anything as stupendously, improbably, and heart-rendingly lovely as this? But that last formulation in turn opens out upon a greater wonder still, the shivering, shimmering ghost at the heart of the great machine: Given that there is something rather than nothing, why, how does it come to be (after all, how easily could it never have come to be!) (and how terrifyingly easily could it all yet cease to be) that embedded in its midst there is something capable of becoming aware of, let alone appreciating, all that splendor?"

What strikes me about this is that it is wrong, though not in spirit: the Universe very much does not need anything to wonder at it or ask why it is there. If it did, we would be necessary rather than contingent, and there would be nothing surprising at all about existing. Berkeley would, in a small but consequential sense, be right.

The thing that always baffled me, as far back as I can remember, was that I was me and not anyone else. Why I am looking in on the Universe from this little portal of subjectivity and not from yours, or from that of a pre-historic dog? It's not a question with an answer, because its answer is a tautology, but it's baffling for all that. This is, I think, the question that begs the most for me to ascribe meaning to my life - though as it is a moot question, that ascription has grim prospects.

Nested Colons: A corollary: Perhaps the one idea of all of these that you may not have considered before: Since our consciousness is a naturally emergent property of the Universe and a product of evolution, our senses and our capacity for understanding are limited to the side effects of evolutionary necessity. The whole nature of the way we understand the world is just due to happenstance, the least possible attributes and skills and senses we need to survive: we are not "put here to understand the Universe." We try to do so only because we don't have anything better to do. And really, can you imagine anything more worthwhile to aspire to, though we can never achieve it?

The Believer

2009-11-28T02:07:00.001-06:00

"The Believer is a monthly magazine where length is no object.
There are book reviews that are not necessarily timely, and that are very often very long.
There are interviews that are also very long.
We will focus on writers and books we like.
We will give people and books the benefit of the doubt.
The working title of this magazine was The Optimist."

I discovered this magazine many months after stumbling across one article in it and being given another by Caitlin. I made the connection idly scrolling through my accumulated bookmarks and realizing I had two articles from the same magazine but didn't know anything about the magazine. Especially in its early days, this magazine was everything I would ever want in a magazine, and a lot of what I dream this blog could be.

It is ostensibly a literature magazine, and during its first few years included many original pieces. There was a heavy emphasis on prose poetry. Each issue included a Light, a Tool, a Ch ild, a Motel, and a Mam mal. There was an Idea Share. There are also plentiful book reviews (moreso in the more recent issues). There is a music issue and an art issue each year. The meat of the magazine is in indulgent articles from people like us, except more like our ideal selves than our real selves (at least as writers and intellectuals, that is), regarding things they have done, issues in the world, or, most often, people (usually authors) they are fascinated by. There is also an interview with a philosopher in almost every issue, most of which deal with morality. There are sometimes interviews with Scientists as well.

Each of the links I included in the previous paragraph I feel is highly worth reading. Some are long while others are quite short.

I want to affirm again that this magazine is one of the potential things we would make if we were given the resources. It's beautiful.

τέτρα στοιχεῖα

2009-11-24T18:01:00.000-06:00

I've successfully embarked on the further development of that concept I wrote about earlier. Here's my first rough draft of a presentation explaining only part of it, I have quite a lot more planned out already. I hope to go into much more depth with this project, hopefully creating a book worth of writing and probably visual aids as well, I think they help. I appreciate any and all feedback, and I hope you guys enjoy it! =D
Love Blase

τέτρα στοιχεῖα

View more presentations from BlaseShare.

Poetry

2009-11-22T14:41:00.001-06:00

After we'd finished Einstein, the next and last work we read in Freshman Studies this term was the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. I had never heard of Bishop, and didn't particularly enjoy her works. The class discussions we had, meant to help us increase our appreciation for the poems, instead merely helped me understand them cognitively - our professor implied this assertion that poetry could be appreciated as a puzzle, which, while true, doesn't mean that if you solve the puzzle, you necessarily appreciate the poem lyrically. I don't mean to try to start a discussion here of 'what poetry is' because after all, unlike science and like pornography, poetry isn't something that can be defined: you just know it when you see it.

Some questions to spark discussion (I can only hope. . . ):

1. Why do poets (and artists in general) take on the limitations of form? Why, for example, would you choose to write a sestina instead of a free verse poem? As poets and artists have moved away from strict forms, have they done anything else differently to accomplish whatever form did for artists previously?

2. Is it better to read a poem independently, judging on its own terms, without taking into account information about the author's biography or historical and contextual references? More specifically, regarding poems in which outside information (arguably) plays an important role in understanding, is there an order in which you would apply multiple approaches?

3. Considering that I didn't like Bishop much, and most of you have probably never heard of her (had you?), what one poet would you suggest for a class like Freshman Studies? It should be something pretty widely accessible, with some depth of meaning, and not too avant-garde, if only because it is meant as a representative sample of "poetry," in order to help students appreciate poetry as a whole, not to show them a cool individual experimental poet.

Also feel free to just post poetry here. That'd be lovely. I am enjoying prose poetry right now; what do you all think of it? To me, it's highly reminiscent of the things Erik Helwig and Alex write, in that it is funny and beautiful at the same time, and in that it is surreal and playful.

http://www.webdelsol.com/LITARTS/edson/

College has Over, College is Broken

2009-11-21T23:54:00.000-06:00

As I sit and write this, my roommate quite literally keeps hacking pieces of his lungs into our sink. He claims this is a good sign - I am dubious.

Tonight I finished the first term of College. Relief and relaxation are overpowering and washing away stress and discouragement, for the moment. I look forward to spending the weekend and most of my six-week winter break reading and sleeping and writing. I have several somewhat ambitious writing projects in mind:

- A journal letter documenting the psychological aspects of this term.

- A philosophical treatise about objective reality and time, without a real thesis or point - a belleletristic (favorite word of today) piece of philosophy.

- A smut story meant to imitate Lovecraft and also be funny meanwhile.

Speaking of Lovecraft, I've been reading Alex's Best of H.P. Lovecraft in big chunks lately. For some reason I decided to write a "critical piece" on his work, which I've done, and decided it was very poorly executed and not worthwhile in the first place. I will try to say what I said in it in one paragraph here:

I find it interesting to note that Lovecraft's own rational, scientific mindset is discounted and made to seem narrow-minded in his works. Instead of presenting this view in opposition to the depravity of the Horror in his stories, the conflict is instead always between the wholly and inconceivably unfamiliar and the 'wholesome,' familiar world, represented in Lovecraft's historical context by Christianity. This makes sense, however, when one contemplates the reason Lovecraft wrote fiction. He was not merely writing to make money, or to give people cheap thrills: his work is an attempt to Romanticize the latest scientific discoveries, which shifted humanity ever further from the center of a meaningful Universe, discoveries that “all contributed to make the human race seem even more insignificant, powerless and doomed in a materialistic and mechanical universe.”

I went with my mom, Alex, Trey, and Cansu to Shenandoah Books the other day and bought the following Books there: The Virgin and The Gipsy, and Lady Chatterley's Lover, both by D.H. Lawrence, The Conquest of Happiness, by Bertrand Russell, Fatu-Hiva and Aku-Aku, both by Thor Heyerdahl, The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh, The Plague, by Albert Camus, The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje, and Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann, as well as a collection of short stories by ETA Hoffmann.

An incomplete vision

2009-11-17T14:00:00.000-06:00

It's taken me forever to post this. I hope this provides some insight on a certain characteristic of mine. I had the idea to write a grand composition of sorts explaining a concept that came to my head. In a somewhat failed attempt to capture the thought as it occurred, since I knew otherwise I'd never get around to writing it, I jotted quickly what came to my mind spur 'o' the moment style. I got kind of off the topic of what my main goal was, and never finished it. I wasn't gonna post it on SC yet, since I was convincing myself I was gonna rewrite it and finish it. I probably never will, I've already gotten a new idea basically about the same thing which I think will be a more effective way of explaining it. Now I just hope I can get some work done on that before I get another new idea 2 weeks from now. Anyways, remember this isn't the core of what I originally wanted to say, nor has it been edited and improved as Adam suggested, but if I don't do it now I probably will never post it. Carpe diem.

"Let me share with you my vision. I yearn to be part of something greater than myself, to join in a community of people who radiate life’s energy and vibrate together in beauty, basking in each other’s glow. Life is not something that happens, but an energy to be created and expressed by everyone in all that they do. A genius is just someone lucky enough or determined enough to express their potential at some point in their life. Every one of us is capable of such genius, but like all life, it requires the right environment to develop. Our potential/energy/genius/beauty, it needs nourishment, just like a plant needs light, water, and fertile soil. The essential component is love.

Love is the light, the fire, the warmth which fosters our inner beauty and encourages it to flourish. It is something beyond definition, but I hope the words I use will resonate with your soul, and you will remember something you felt in your life which was love. To show love to someone, means to be willing to get to know them, what they like, who they are, their past, their dreams for the future, and not only accepting them, but appreciating them, and seeking the same love from them. Sharing love with someone creates an open flow in which you can communicate your ideas, thoughts and dreams, without fear for rejection or disapproval. It is that social connection that humans as social beings yearn for, and it is through connecting with each other that we share our potential and power to achieve our dreams and fill our lives with beauty.

So few of us seem to experience true love, we are fooled into believing it is something we can only share with our mate, but we are so mistaken. All is full of love, or should I say potential love, just like the potential energy you learn about in physics. We can, and often do, love our family, neighbors and friends. Sometimes it’s just a smile or saying hi, we only release some of our potential energy, our potential love. But every relationship you have with another human could be as full of love as the relationship you have with your spouse or lover. You could meet a complete stranger, and if you shared yourself with them for one year, unconditionally accepting them for who they are, you would forge a bond of true love with them. We could share our lives, our love with one another, but we don’t. Perhaps we are afraid, afraid that we will try to reach out but be turned away or shot down, not returned the love which we offer. It seems so difficult, but if we lived and grew in a community where everyone let their love radiate and shared their lives with each other, if as children we grew up each day with a daily dose of love from all around us, it would become part of our very essence to do the same.

Many people have tried to define “human nature”, saying people are inherently this or inherently that. People are not inherently good or bad, but we each have an amazing potential for both. Boys grow up in the ghetto of Los Angeles, are given the identity of a blood or a crip, and become soldiers. Killing is a part of everyday life, they and adapt to it and become accustomed to it. But even then, nobody likes it that way, they would get out of the hood if they had a chance. Nobody likes facing the threat of death every day, the will to live is certainly a part of human nature. If inherently we all want the best for our own lives, if that is part of human nature, the only way we can do that is not through competing and fighting, but through caring for and sharing with one another. If that is true, then the behavior most beneficial and desirable to human nature is that of love. The sharing of our love energy with one another provides the base on which we can build our dreams and make them real, enriching every fiber of our lives with beauty.

This abundant love energy serves as the fuel for our creative energy, and our pursuit for perfect beauty. It must be understood that before we can exude beauty in all that we do, we must first have that equivalent abundance of love. This energy field of love, in essence is a spiritual connection of humanness, since really love is the sharing and expression of our humanness with each other. If we are so deeply connected with this spiritual force of humanness, we can all the more easily connect with nature, and imbue our human energy and beauty in our interactions with it. Everything we do is an interaction with the nature around us, whether it’s growing a plant, throwing a ball, or painting a picture. We can channel the energy we receive from love into these actions and interactions, into everything we do. The concept of “art” is exactly that.

A song is more than just a collection of sounds, and a painting is more than paints on a canvas, it is a manifestation of our humanness/human energy in a natural physical form. The more we are in touch with our collective and individual humanness through love, the more and easier we can express this energy in balance with and cooperation with nature’s energy and create beauty in all we do. Beauty is a harmony and balance with nature, and an expression of our harmony...." and then I stopped for some reason and had to do something else I guess. I never went back and reformatted it or continued it :/

Science

2009-11-07T01:59:00.002-06:00

I'd like to paraphrase and reproduce and expand on a discussion we had in Freshman Studies today as a conclusion to our study of Einstein's Relativity. I want to do this to practice creating the kind of provocative and insightful discussions my professor does in class, and because I think it is an interesting topic.

Q. What is Science?

Before moving on, stop and think through this for a minute. Develop a provisional definition of Science. Write it down.

My initial definition from class: Science is the rigorously skeptical search to establish what we can regard as objectively true, independent of perceptual or emotional or other bias.

Things a definition should do, and how my definition fails to do them:

1. Establish qualifications dividing things that are science from things that merely seem to be.
I fear mine is too rigorous - should it be explicitly expanded to include the kind of interpretational or contextually unique truths produced by sciences like sociology, historical analysis, and political science? What "rigorous skepticism" implies and how it is obtained practically must be explained in order to very specifically exclude all things that do not meet those criteria.

2. Establish that Plato's Republic and other works that apply logical reasoning in pursuit of Truth in metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, etc, are not Science. As David Edgerton says, "a definition of science needs to define the nature of the knowledge not the means of its creation only." Why would a hypothetical work that, unlike the Republic, used a logically rigorous and thorough scientific process to discover what the true nature of Justice is, not qualify as Science?

I am intentionally refraining from trying to fix these flaws in my own definition. I want you all to create your own definitions, and then we will hopefully critique each others' and arrive at a few serviceable definitions.

A. As defined by the British Science Council after a year of deliberations, "Science is the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence." Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is not Science. (Will anyone appreciate this reference?) Sarcasm aside, however, does this definition meet our criteria? Do you accept it?

The Sacred and the Profane

2009-11-04T22:17:00.006-06:00

Back from the dead.
That's me.
The influx of good posts has served as jumper cables for my carbody.

I will say something relevant to dreams because that's where we started:
A month ago I went to Ontario to visit my parents for the first time since I moved out in July. A week after I got back, I had two odd dreams within a few days of each other. In the first, my dad beat me up. He punched and kicked me until I couldn't move, and I woke up crying, and feeling humiliated and furious. Then a night or two later, I dreamed that my mom had a psychotic break and I needed to call 911 but she was hoarding all the phones and I was terrified she might hurt me or herself. I woke up crying and feeling inconsolably panicked.

In an offhand conversation, I told my boss, an anthropologist, about the dreams. She was so unsurprised that it didn't even occur to her to be surprised, which surprised me because I was shocked by the dreams. (Untangle that sentence for ten points.) She said that she had some of her worst nightmares between high school and college. This type of experience is so common that anthropology has a specific name (I forget it, though) for such transitional periods and the feelings and actions they evoke. Actions: in a phase of life with few established rules and rituals and little external structure, we must create our own rules and rituals. Thoughts: we must distinguish things as either sacred or profane by ourselves, and we experiment with making profane that which was once sacred (friends, family, ideas...). We do some of these experiments in dreams. Hmm...

I thought that was an interesting take on a phenomenon we're all interested in.

Incidentally, I have heard the phrase "the sacred and the profane" a lot before. And I know it's fairly common, but does anyone know where specifically I would have heard it repeated in literature? I'm thinking either Anais Nin or Henry Miller? Help?

Possible artist statement. Thoughts. Thoughts?

2009-10-29T12:16:00.003-06:00

Last time I posted something sizable, something rotating around my thoughts or though process, I didn't get any comments at all. In fact, that post still has no comments. But I'm going to attempt to get your opinions once more...
This artist statement [in progress] is specifically for my fibers studio class, but the thoughts that filter through my work in that medium also factor into my other practices and my general view of relationships, interaction, and the movement of the world. This is my first draft.

--
Artist Statement

When considering the collection and recording of texts, it is notable that:
The amount of text that is displayed in the inbox screen must be directly reflected in the personal title of the recreation of the text.
The word breaks and usage of letters, numbers, punctuation, and grammar must all be taken exactly from the source message to preserve the integrity of the original message and the person and moment and development associated with said message.
The date and time of each message should be noted and charted so as to give context and keep the text in its most original form with the basic information set given.
Organization of text messages should not necessarily tell a complete story or work as a straight narrative; however, there should be an implied emotional record or chart of development supposed with the relationship between receiver and each corresponding person sending the texts.

The format of fibers makes texts, a distant and impersonal communication tool, a bit more personal and attempts to reclaim them, the connections they represent, and/or the emotions previously filtered through a technological fog. Printing makes reference to the impersonality and the mass of superficial communication made available and exploited by texting and technology in general, but the use of hand-written letters with the associated time involved with etching and printing does again what embroidering or stitching the texts does: it adds a touch of humanity. This is alienated humanity, though, since it comes directly from the receiver and attempts to fill the pits left by senders. Texts are still seen through my particular history, experience, and DNA and selected because of the way these things tint my view of each. Because the texts the viewer might see are selected, the viewer’s sense of reality or narrative or even function is warped and detached, fitting the overall theme of the work despite its seeming attempts to calm this reality, or even fight it. Each text still feels a bit out of place… lonely, even.

This in no way explains the mindset of today or the disconnect I associate with it. I, having lived only in this century, have no real means by which to accurately make a claim about mindsets past, and so have no way to compare them to the present, or define the present by them. Even so, it is my impression that any sort of zeitgeist right now is a disconnected, unfocused, and lonely one. I mainly explore this through communication.
Despite ourselves, we aim for it. We wave our hands, distort our faces, speak, write, scribble, touch. We share things. We make.
The key in it all seems to be communication.

We can’t help this; it’s programmed into us to communicate, to connect, and in doing so, to stay alive and reproduce. Every emotion is set in brain waves and bodily balances. Every social experience, experiment, and impulse can be broken down into basic chemicals and survival of the species. We make friend groups, essentially, for survival and to fill our ‘trust’ quota, another safety mechanism. We romance for the sake of species continuation. We hold family bonds because groups are safer units and give us support systems. We search for identity as a means of understanding ourselves, sorting others, and measuring compatibility and associate ourselves with specifics to facilitate this. So, we continue to interact, despite the emotional wear-and-tear and the continued failure to truly connect with another, which we’re programmed to long for, search for, and possibly even think we’ve found.

Focusing simply on language, our attempts to communicate with each other, to understand, be understood, and through this, connect comes across rapidly. Everything has a written reciprocal. Documentation, receipts, records, lists, poetry, science books, street signs. We write and we read and we type and we hit “enter”, and in the fractured attention and narrative of our current day-to-day, we see this as communication. We accept this as connection. But at the same time, there is a feeling. There is a longing, a yearning for something we feel we’ve had before or something we feel we deserve, we need. This is because, despite our attempts, the lists mean nothing. We still cannot understand each other. We have only ever been ourselves and that is where our experience lies and so, to us, being ourselves is what it is to be human. To me, Caitlin is human. Caitlin is humanity. Caitlin is my understanding of us as a species. But even so, we can hardly understand ourselves. What a ludicrous thing it is to then suppose we can understand others. What you can’t understand, you can’t really know, and you can’t really be connected with. We are solitary creatures tricked by our bodies into believing otherwise. Nobody can truly be understood or understand. We have different histories and different genes and everything has a mental inflection or fluctuation. Language alone allows for interpretation and supposition and we fill in gaps with assumption and bend words and sounds based on what we know or feel or have experienced. All in all, what we have is just enough to get by. Our emotions get the better of us and we give meaning to even little things. We hold on. We continue to try to communicate, and through that, to connect, and we hold tight the things we feel we have connections with and the things we think represent connections we have with others. This goes beyond physical hoarding associated with OCD and magical thinking and into emotional hoarding and organization and classification of our lives and structures and emotions and all the people we see as involved in these things. So, despite our essential loneliness and separation from each other and the very physical aspects of the world, we continue. It’s all we have, and it’s the closest thing we’ve got to knowing, and knowing, attempting understanding, is the closest we’ve gotten to each other. This search, this longing, this attempt is in every word, letter, and sound. It sits on the curve of every line and balls under every vocalization sliding past our tongues. It’s in everything I say today and all the sentences I’ve ever strung or will string, and when the mufflers of miscommunication are removed, it blares from every keystroke of this document.

Please, I want you to know me. I need someone to know me.

final drafts of poems for poetry portfolio

2009-10-25T23:09:00.001-06:00

Foundation

Warming instruments;
Some play scales,
Or gentle runs.
We play a single note,
The only note,
The bass note of our scale.
A supporting role,
Always playing
Only the support role.
With their warm up
Fast and lacey.
And our warm up
Slow and strong.
Our building up often
Ends in an unheard peak.
Their prowess is flaunted
In flowing technique.
While we tubas wait
Buried far beneath,
But our role immerges
Once the true note is needed,
For it will not be the top
But the bottom that sounds.

Funeral party

The dead man had one wish;
His funeral was to be happy.
Musicians, dancing and plenty
Of drinks and drugs to go round.

But with their hearts
And his body in pieces,
No one felt it appropriate
To celebrate his demise.

Until the priest in ethereal gown
Examined the body and announced,
‘This man never had a soul,’ relief
Spread and the drinking commenced.

Permits were attained and
Hallucinogens were spread
Amongst the living until the dead
Joined the crowded dance floor.

The dead man began to DJ, playing
Songs of the dead layer with the deepest
Beats to which the dead dancing the lead
And the living pulsed like marionettes.

The neighbors ordered the police
And the church to end this abomination,
But no laws were broken or sins committed,
The proper permits had been filed.

When the funeral took to the streets
neighbors, police and church all joined,
Drinks in hand and narcotics in system,
Dancing to the dead man’s unholy beat.

The dead man began feeding
His music into the city’s P.A.,
And soon the dance of the dead
Stole away the lives of the living.

The dead city had only one wish;
Their funeral was to be happy.
Musicians, dancing and plenty
Of drinks and drugs to go round.

Need

My shyly uttered stutter
Your overwhelming confidence
My unexpected reply
Your money paying for me
My fiercely burning loneliness
Our silhouettes intertwining
This is why I loved you.

My lack of your phone call
My veil that couldn’t hide two
Your perfectly white suburbia
My baby tearing my flesh
Your perpetual overtime
This is why I needed you

My hope for one night of rest
My endless shitty diapers
Her lilac perfume on your shirt
His first word being daddy
This is why we left you.

Pieces of Her Life

Her cassettes carry
Another soul’s story
Across time and out
Her car stereo leaving
Us together listening
To a playlist of life.

Her music played on empty ears
We were busy crafting plans
To meet again. These brief moments
Were barely enough

For me to catch a glimpse;
Of her hacked short hair
Of her broken smoker’s voice.
Lacelike smoke traces
Her perfectly flawed self.
Her black lined eyes reflecting
My own fragmented form;
Unkempt ponytail,
Comfort clothes still thick
With my husband’s cologne.
These things do not translate
Into phone lines. No. They need
To be taken in lifestyle wise.

We that kiss forbidden.

My one vice in an otherwise
Wholesome lustrous life.
Beauty of his eye guarded,
I stay sheltered from my true
Calling; my love that meets
Me when he’s a far away.

Horizon violated by the sun
Signals that our time is up.
My children need a mother
So with pieces of another’s
Life playing over the radio
We drive the long minutes
Back to the reality of life.

Essay for Sustainable Development Class

2009-10-18T08:45:00.001-05:00

Here's an essay I typed up for my sustainable development class. Any feedback would be appreciated. Enjoy :D

We live in a world where people and nature are ceaselessly abused and exploited. An overwhelming amount of people live in absolute poverty and die of hunger and disease. These people are paid less than a living wage, barely surviving in conditions often worse than slavery. They are removed from the lands they have lived on for millennia, displaced by urban development or wilderness preservation sites. Numerous species are going extinct, the rainforest is getting smaller, the desert bigger, and we are spewing toxins into the air, land and water at an alarming rate. We are using such an excess amount of resources that we may soon have nothing left, driving ourselves to extinction.

It seems obvious that solving these problems should be a top priority, but the system which has the most power to fix the world is the one which is doing the most to destroy it. This system is the dominant global culture of materialism, in which possessions and profits trump all, and it is spreading faster and faster to every corner of the world. It’s a monster which feeds on the worst of human qualities: greed. It’s our insatiable greed which pushes it to grow ever larger, and it sees anything which hinders its growth as a threat; even those who would try and heal the wounds we have inflicted upon our planet are shunned by the powerful and shut out from mainstream media.

Nonetheless, great advances have been made at the grassroots level, depending on generosity and social power instead of greed and economic power. Pro-poor conservation seeks to let endangered environments be maintained by their native inhabitants, who have lived in them symbiotically for ages. Ecological economics seeks to reform the economic systems which have catalyzed materialism so that they recognize human needs other than material wealth as also being significant. Simple living has been advocated as a more fulfilling alternative to the cycle of hyper-consumption that the masses are being herded into. Fair trade has sought to remedy the injustices done to the global south and bring the world into closer solidarity.

Yet the selfishness of those in power, the establishment of materialism, has made its counterattacks to each of these. Environmental protection has been taken up, but in a way that hordes the land as a precious commodity for the wealthy, removing the indigenous peoples to create a pristine wilderness getaway. New ideas and values like ecological economics have been mostly shut out of conventional education by corporate domineered universities. Advertising and consumer culture retains its grip on peoples’ minds, using the farce of overpopulation to cloak the true problem of overconsumption. Fair trade is equally swept aside, kept unfamiliar to the public by the profusion of advertising of unfair goods and kept off of the shelves or overpriced at the typical markets.

Corporate power is a formidable rival, but this power is centralized in the hands of the few. If the hands of the many worked together to topple the greed and selfish of materialism, it is we who would be the giant. But people don’t turn their greed into generosity that easily. It takes a spiritual conversion of sorts to get people to care about more than just themselves. And if all the dominant forms of the media are owned by corporations, how will the people most isolated from these grassroots efforts ever be reached? An understanding of the issues the world faces and the possible solutions to these problems is not so difficult to achieve, but gaining the wisdom of how to shift the world into a new state of being seems nearly impossible. Perhaps it can only be done little by little.

Didgeridoo Corollary

2009-10-15T00:00:00.002-05:00

Tonight Dean Pertl delivered the first event in the Conservatory's World Music Series, a lecture on the history and culture of the didgeridoo. I should apologize, before I go on, that I have been brought to posting nothing more here than glorified lecture notes. I hope they are thought provoking and shouldn't be too long. Also, keep in mind that this is secondhand, recollected gross oversimplification of generalized, compressed information. The ideas should be interesting, though.

Apparently one of the Aboriginal Creation myths talks about Creative Spirits walking around the earth and singing the world as it is today into being; if I understand correctly, singing things from the Dreamtime (a sort of spiritual combination of the Force and Plato's World of Forms) into "reality." The paths these spirits took during this process are called Songlines. The spirits then went back into the earth or went into the sky to live as stars, and left the care of the earth to the Aborigines. This care consists of the singing of songs to "keep the land 'alive.'" "In singing they preserve the land/story/dreaming of their ancestors, and recreate it in their oneness of past, present and future."

When the English colonized Australia, and eventually drove the Aborigines from their native lands, this process was prevented, and in an Aboriginal interpretation, this is why the land is dying (there was a noticeable drop in the health of the ecosystems of the Western Desert after all the nomadic tribes there had been removed); the cause of ecological collapse in the world as a whole is because the Songs are no longer sung.

Apparently, Dean Pertl once interviewed 60 people, of whom 40 independently described the sound of a didgeridoo as "the sound the Earth would make if it could sing." This would be quite fascinating, if it weren't a quote from something or other, which it seems to be.

The other thing of interest, especially to this community, was the discussion of authenticity. It seems that some people in the didgeridoo community in the West insist on using real Aboriginal instruments, mimicking their sounds, and trying to be "authentic" and, I guess, not appear to be stealing real culture and altering it in ways that might seem disrespectful. This is in contrast to the spirit of Aboriginal culture, which is concerned with sounds (so using a plastic instrument instead of one made of wood makes sense if it sounds better) and mimics things in the player's life; for an Aborigine, this would include dingos, kangaroos, etc, but a Westerner living in a city would have an extremely different palate of noises to mimic.

There has also been a movement to call didgeridoos (an onomatopoeic name made up by European listeners) by an "authentic" name; however, since they are called different things by different tribes, and since each tribe uses different materials and techniques to construct, no one "authentic" name would describe the whole family of instruments. Any one name (Yirdaki, for example) would be accurately applied to only one particular type of didgeridoo, and wrong for the rest.

"Under The Earth Tones"

2009-10-08T23:08:00.003-05:00

Incidentally, to fulfill a college stereotype, I am writing this when I should be 'writing a paper.' I want to capture the fresh impressions. I also apologize that in all of these journalistic reporting pieces, particularly the camping trip journal, I am far more concerned with completeness and recording information than with concision or readability. This is not meant to be the sort of review that would appear in any real publication. It's mostly for me, and for anyone who cares to read my bad writing (hi mom :).

This evening, we had an incredible performance that illustrated some of the things I am really coming to enjoy about Lawrence: its cosmopolitanism and, somewhat less tangibly, a sense of play, of living a good life (I am a sucker for language like this, sorry; there is a quote from our former President that says something along the same lines, that at Lawrence the point of education is not learning skills or facts, but learning how live a life). Our Dean of the Conservatory, Brian Pertl, is a trombone and didgeridoo player and throat singer and conch player and etc. He and my percussion teacher, Dane, performed a piece by Lawrence Ferlinghetti with a theater man and a bass player at convocation.

The concert tonight was occasioned by a visit from Pertl's teacher, Stuart Dempster, who fits the same general description. The wikipedia article credits him for introducing the didjeridoo to North America, which is kind of cool. More importantly, though, he is a really vibrant, zany, playful man and this comes through in his playing.

When we entered the room, there were trombone players standing all around the edges of the room, scattered among the audience. Dempster stood in the center of the room, and from there introduced the first piece, which he called "Lawrence Trombone Universe." The piece originally had a different name, and was written for a smaller number of trombones to take advantage of the acoustical properties of the Cistern Chapel, an abandoned two million gallon water tank that boasts a 45 second reverberation. Before playing, Dempster had the audience hum an F, and hold that pitch throughout the piece. The trombones were then called in one by one at Dempster's nod as he spun around in a circle. He did this gradually for the entire piece, signaling the musicians to move from one repeated pattern to the next, starting with that F drone, building to a climax with somewhat more motion, and returning to the drone.

The next few pieces were done from on stage, with Dempster, Pertl, Dane, and another man playing accordion. The pieces they did were certainly weird, the kind of ambient, improvisatory music that some people like to deny acknowledging as such (music, that is). Some people may have a hard time getting past that, especially reading a review like this, without being able to see for themselves. This kind of music benefits enormously from being heard live, where your concentration is relatively undivided, and the acoustics can take their full effect. More importantly, though, is the sight of the performers and how much fun they are having.

There were several pieces in this mold, with Dean Pertl and several trombone students holding drones on didgeridoo while Dempster and the accordion player played over top. Dane had a messy (in the best way) setup, one of those one-man-band style "alternative drumsets." He was sitting on a cajon, which he played with his right foot, had a bell loop on his left foot, and switched around between a rain drum, a shaker, and a variety of "toys" from a big suitcase to his right. Dempster switched back and forth between trombone, conch, and his own pile of toys.

Another piece, along the same lines, featured Dean Pertl on a Dungchen. The instrument had been sitting on stage the entire time, about 2 feet high, a big bell with elaborate metal ornamentation. For the piece, he opened it up like a telescope, into 5 sections, as you can see in the picture. This is what it sounds like. He also did some throat singing in this piece. You can hear what most of this sounds like in these two videos of Pertl and Dempster.

The audience was asked to participate again in the next bit, an ode to a rainforest. We did the old rain trick, starting with rubbing your hands together, snapping, then patting and stomping, while they played droning didgeridoo and made animal noises. IGLU, our Improvisational Group, played with them next, doing what was easily the most abstruse, sparse piece of the night, for those of us who enjoy that sort of thing. Dean Pertl then performed a didgeridoo solo accompanied by Dane. Dane did a tambourine solo (very impressive) while everyone else vacated the stage.

The solo was cut off when the lights went out, and 4 glowing eyeballs came on stage, making odd growls and screeches. They came out into the audience, turning on and off sporadically. This last piece was written by Pertl for Dempster's 70th birthday concert, and he constructed the didgerdoos for it himself. I should add that while some of the didgeridoos they played were real wood or bamboo, most of them are the new plastic ones that just look like black pipes. To these were added backlit eyeballs controlled by a switch under the player's thumb. This is probably one of the zaniest things I had seen done in a "classical" context, until the end of the recital.

They resumed their normal stage setup after this, and did a final improvisatory piece like the ones before. However, this time, both the accordion player and Dempster got up and first went back and forth, fighting with sounds, circling around chairs and jumping at each other. They snuck back behind Pertl, still seated, and Dempster climbed onto a chair, pointing his bell at Pertl's head. Pertl then stood up, and he and the accordion player fell on the ground and died as the piece ended, with Dempster still frozen, also dead, on his chair.

The recital ended with another audience participation thing. Dempster decided to do this on the spot, telling us to take the "happy baby" pose (a yoga position, which he demonstrated) in our minds, and play with noises. He came out into the aisles and barked and growled and interacted in a very silly way with the audience, who responded in kind.

Merhaba

2009-10-05T14:35:00.004-05:00

Hey everyone, my name's Blase. I've been meaning to post something here for a long time now, but I'm such a perfectionist I had to come up with something good to write first, but I never did. So I'm just typing whatever now just to make sure I don't put it off until eternity.

I was an exchange student in Istanbul through Rotary Youth Exchange, I met Adam this summer at a conference and he told me about this blog, so here I am. I am from MI, and right now I am studying International Relations and Diplomacy in Madrid, Spain.

I am really looking to start discussing various global and/or social justice issues and build some ideas with people who have the same interests. I'd type more, but my hand is kind of messed up right now for some reason, so instead of finishing my introduction properly I'll leave it as a cliffhanger.

Links

2009-10-03T15:34:00.005-05:00

Hello, everyone.

I am in college and am a very busy man. I would very much like to find time to write a journal about this time, and post it for discussion with all of you. However, I haven't found this time yet, and in the meantime, I would like to share a bunch of nice links I have been shown in the past few months.

This is an interview with James Turrell, a very interesting light artist. He was referenced by Barry Lopez in About This Life, and so I went looking for information on him.

As ever, many of these I found (and am now stealing) from Rachel Leow. She now has a new site, incidentally, that aggregates all of her on the internet.

This is a short book review that summarizes quite well how I feel about the part "spirituality" - for lack of a better word - should play in our lives. The awe we feel at the Universe sometimes, the astonishment of merely being alive, is a beautiful feeling and something we can and ought to cultivate, but there are no conclusions to be drawn from it. It is incommunicable, an increase in understanding that can not itself be understood rationally. I feel this is important.

These are just some nice, very surreal pictures.

If any of you are interested in education theory or philosophy, this book is an interesting compilation of subjects "important young internet intellectuals" feel are vital to a 21st century Liberal Arts education (which, of course, is the only kind of education worthy of the name ;)).

Shane showed me this radio program a while ago. I haven't listened to many episodes yet, but it is a good popular science kick when that is what you would like. One of the episodes (on Time) included a sample of "9 Beet Stretch," Leif Inge's renewal of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. It was electronically stretched to last 24 hours, and is a very interesting ambient noise now. I enjoy listening to it, especially at night.

Alex posted this on facebook a while ago; it has samples of about a dozen collections of beautiful photographs, most of them related to science. There are 4 from each set, but they each have links to the photographer's website. They are all exceptional.

Some of you know who Courtney Rabideau is; for the others, suffice it to say that she went to school in Cass City with us. However, I don't think any of us ever spent much time with her. She is eminently worth knowing, though, and seems to me a kindred spirit of girls like Sylvie and Rachel (I speak of her as though I actually knew her, which is interesting). I am shocked to realize I never invited her to this blog or my personal one. She has just recently started her own blog, and I thought perhaps some of you would enjoy reading it.

This video got forwarded to our percussion studio a few days ago. It is kind of silly pop science stuff, but the last few minutes have some really fascinating high speed footage of a snare drum and a cymbal being hit and vibrating.

Here there are horrifically haunting children, very worth perceiving.

Our Trip To The U.P.

2009-08-02T23:28:00.020-05:00

Alex, Shane, and Adam's Trip to the UP, narrated by Shane and Adam and and artistic descriptions and reflections provided by Adam and Shane.

There are pictures available on facebook; Alex was going to and still might upload bigger versions into the appropriate narrative points in this post, which would make things easier for all of you.

Thursday, July 16 - After assembling all the supplies to be found in Cass City, we set out for Ann Arbor. On the way, we stopped at Shane's dad's house, ate wild berries and garden cucumbers, and picked up a pot and some other items. Driving down was uneventful, listening to Grizzly Bear. For some reason, we couldn't find a restaurant open on the way down, however, and everyone was very hungry by the time we arrived, around 12:30 AM. Alyssa recommended that we go to Kroger and pick up some food. Alex bought, and we ended up with a frozen pizza, kettle chips, and 3 quarts of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. We arrived at Alyssa's Fancy Apartment, and settled in. Sarah Howard was already there, using the Internet. We ate pizza and ice cream and talked about Schrodinger's Cat.

Friday, July 17 - We woke up late the next morning and headed by bus to downtown Ann Arbor, where the art fair stalls were located. The boys and girls quickly separated, largely because the girls had seen the first section of the fair already and were moving faster. There were a lot of great artists, really innovative and provocative things, and overall it was a much more rewarding experience than the Plymouth or Cadillac art fairs, the ones I had been to before. We collected business cards from exceptional artists, including many photographers (international photographers; that is, they all photographed "travel" subjects, like Italy, fog on mountains in China, cottages in England, etc), a space photographer who built his own telescopes, a Latino diorama maker, an outsider artist named Doug Odom (a group favorite), and several cool craftspeople, like bookmakers and hat felters (?).

We also went for a time to Borders and looked at various art books. Of special note to us was "A Collaboration with Nature" by Andy Goldsworthy, which inspired our own erstwhile nature art attempt later in the week. At some point in the bookstore, Trey called to tell me he and David Jansen were coming down and would be there in a couple hours. When they arrived, we took a walk through the last booths we hadn't seen, and then went out to eat at Jerusalem Gardens. We went out for ice cream afterward at Stucchi's. Trey and David left after that, and we went to the Dawn Treader Used Book Store. I bought Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Hesse's Rosshalde, Peter Hoeg's The History of Danish Dreams (on Sylvie's recommendation; thank you very much), and George Eliot's Middlemarch (a nice old copy for only $1). Alex bought A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, which was his preferred reading for the rest of the week. That night, we watched Frankenfish in Alyssa's living room.

Saturday, July 18 - We had nice bagels for breakfast the next morning, and tried to get in touch with Jeff. Finally, a meeting was arranged at the UM Art Museum, which we toured together briefly and without much interest, for whatever reason. We had wanted to go to the Shaman Drum bookstore, as it was their final day in business and we expected some good deals, but the selection had already been picked clean and no one found anything. We ate at Seva, the vegetarian restaurant, and then Jeff had to go. One more used bookstore, the "Rare and Used Bookshop," was perused then. I got Richard Fortey's Earth, a popularization of geology and plate tectonics in particular, About This Life, by Barry Lopez, and "Chomsky on Miseducation." Alex got an Quantum Theory for Beginners and a copy of the Once and Future King.

At this point we hurried back to Alyssa's apartment to get our things, and then left for Beverly's. Beverly's party was a nice if rather hectic time; we got to see JT and Laura again, for the first time in a year or so, and talk to them. We were on a team together for Beatles trivia, and lost quite well, saying some of the silliest responses. We left early, around 10, and drove up to Saginaw. Once we got there, Shane and I attempted to watch "Dead Ringers," but Erik came home and interrupted us and took us to Denny's for a snack.

Sunday, July 19 - Shane and I woke up and went to Meijer's around midday to purchase all the things we would need. We bought a few camping supplies, like flashlights, a 5 gallon water jug, and the invaluable MaxDeet bugspray, and a large quantity of dried, boxed food. The total was $155. We went to Subway for lunch (Laura works there, and JT suggested we go visit her; however, she'd called in sick and wasn't there). Alex got home from work soon thereafter, and we packed up and left.

We got to Interlochen early enough to buy tickets and then go wander around for a while. I showed the campus and the lake and some ducks, and then we sat down for the concert, talking to Harrison Apple in line. The concert, WYSO with Chris Thile, was opened by a small brass ensemble playing Fanfare for the Common Man by Aaron Copland, which was thunderous and brash and wonderful. Chris Thile came out then and performed Bach's Partita in D Minor as a solo, and then with the orchestra played the first movement of his mandolin concerto. His musicianship on the Bach was incredible. After the concerto, he played several more solo selections, this time bluegrass and traditional songs with vocals as well, including his closer, Brakeman's Blues. The orchestra closed with Appalachian Spring, which they performed impeccably, rich and full and overwhelmingly beautiful.

After the concert, we walked back down to the beach and sat on the edge of the pier while the sun set. Gabe and Max were back from Detroit soon later, but Max had gone in to Traverse City to a bar with Chris Thile, so Gabe took us to Picasso to drop off our things. Sam Reese came in and invited us to the Minnesota Building for hanging out, and so we spent a while there, reading and playing ping pong and meeting people. One of the dancers from last year, I believe the one who went out with Ian Wright(?) was there and apparently had like dated JT's new Best Friend from Saginaw. Kind of an odd experience.

Max got back around 1, just as I was deciding to go to bed. We met him in front of the Maddy Building, and walked to the car to get sleeping bags with him. We talked a bit in the dorms then, and then settled into the computer lobby in the second floor of Picasso and slept.

Monday, July 20 - We woke up at 7:30 or so. I spent a few minutes cuddling with Max in his bed and saying goodbye to Gabe and Sam Reese. Then I made my boys go eat breakfast. The cafeteria adult gave us a $2 apiece discount on a rather mediocre breakfast because I am an alumnus. We left then and drove all the way to the Porcupine Mountains State Park.

We noticed the affluence and tourist-friendly beauty of towns like Charlevoix and Petoskey, and the palatial hotels and golf courses. One interesting joke for the week was picked up at a pharmacy in Petoskey. We went in to go to the bathroom, and while I was waiting outside in the car for Alex to purchase some tea and Shane as asleep, Alex heard the cashier woman tell the old woman in front of him in line about her brother-in-law, who, while hiking somewhere near a cliff but not by the edge of it, miraculously fell off the edge and died, even though he wasn't walking anywhere near the edge. Other than that, there was nothing interesting the whole day. ;( I had to stop once about an hour into the drive and nap for 15 minutes. We didn't arrive until after 9. Once we were registered, we parked at the bottom of the steep hill leading up to the Lake of the Clouds, our intended campsite area. We got all our gear arranged, tied on ramshackle to fallen-apart and brand new and somewhat used backpacks, and stumbled towards the park. Thankfully, a kind couple in a pickup truck let us sit on their tailgate as they drove up the road.

The scenic overlook at the Lake of the Clouds is located on a cliff 700 ft from the valley encompassing the lake itself, where we had planned to find a campsite. The trail is slightly steep and treacherous at night, with plenty of roots and rocks to stumble upon. However, it is a breeze going down as long as you are careful, as gravity does much of the work for you. After spending a few minutes resting and gazing out over the Lake of the Clouds, we made our way down the hill, in twilight muted to darkness by the tree cover. The first campsite we happened across was the first one past the bridge across the swampy river flowing imperceptibly West out of the Lake itself. The site had a fire ring and a bear pole like all the rest, and a toilet, a rare luxury we never ended up needing (there was a much nicer indoor compost toilet at the scenic overlook just a short climb away). We settled in for the night, just setting up our tents (one domicile and one for storage) and falling asleep.

I had hoped that on a camping trip with no artificial lights or computers, we would be subject to the whims of the (capricious and unpredictable) sun, and go to sleep at a reasonable hour, and thus wake up at one, so as to get a lot of good things done. However, no matter how tired we ever got, we always kept each other up until a normal hour, around 2 or 3, with stimulating talk or gossip or tickling or cuddling or massages or other activities.

Tuesday, July 21 - Thus we didn't awake until around 11. Alex and I went in search of water. We walked over a mile down the trail running beside our campsite to the nearest stream (the river we had camped by having been deemed too slow-moving to be healthy even after boiling) and filled our plastic jug with about 3 gallons of river water. The little stream we found, about 4 feet across, was covered in water striders, casting oddly bulbous shadows on the riverbed. Alex carried the jug back, with his trained muscles.

When we returned, we boiled an entire pot of water and made delicious Meijer organic oatmeal - very filling. After eating, we took an exploring walk around a part of the Lake shore - Shane fell asleep on the banks and then we went back to camp, collecting wood to maintain dry in the supply tent. We then went back to bed and napped until 6. We then got up and made soup, which was also delicious.

We cleaned up camp a bit (though not enough, apparently) and headed up to the cliff. The climb back up was far more arduous than the trip down had been the night before. We went off the trail a couple times to the cliff edge to exult and take pictures. Shane harvested four harebell blossoms from the edge of the cliff and we folded them into the pages of Barry Lopez's About This Life. We spent a short time at the top of the cliff, in what would become our habitual hangout: a slightly acute crevice just over the edge of the brick wall built around the scenic overlook proper. Alex, however, soon grew paranoid about some foreboding black storm clouds beyond the south side of the valley. We packed up our things and headed back down to camp.

Alex convinced us to put all the dishes out, in hopes that they would fill with at least a little bit of drinkable rain. We had eaten some granola bars and of course other food by this time, but instead of putting our trash up the bear pole where it belonged, we merely went to bed. It never really rained, and only a few drops of what did fall made it through the trees.

Our First Grate Tragedy Occurs
A raccoon family spent the night trying to get at our food, locked away in Shane's puptent. Shane was at first afraid it was a bear, but we went outside and drove them off with barking noises. They came back several times during the night, and eventually we tired of scaring them off.

Wednesday, July 22 - In the morning, we discovered they had ripped a hole in the front of the tent and actually broken one of the carbon-fiber poles (Shane claimed they were unbreakable, a Space Material). They pulled out the following food, making a mess and ruining them: spaetzle, sourdough bread, raisins, 3 granola bars (eaten entirely), 2 packs of oatmeal, a bag of granola (eaten significantly), a bag of soup. Luckily, we had brought way too much food, and were left with still a little bit too much after sharing these items with the raccoons. From then on, we always used the bear pole. Shane was slightly upset about losing his tent, though.

We decided to spend the day hiking out to Lake Superior and swimming. We climbed the hill, walked down to the car, and drove first to the store, where we got soft-serve ice cream and Alex a soda. Then we filled our water bottles at Union Bay Station, including the big jug, having decided that we would pay the $8 a night to park the car up at the scenic overlook the rest of the week (the walk up that hill and the ambiguity about our campsite was the reason we didn't take potable water in to begin with). Not knowing when we'd get back from our hike, we went to buy our parking passes right away. Between the trailhead and the ticket booth, we saw a young black bear on the side of the road. We didn't get a very good look at him, however.

We parked at the Lake Superior Trailhead, which is where we had left the car before. Apparently it is accepted that people who don't want to pay the car admission fee park on the side of the road there. A big doe was walking around the trailhead. She was a bit shier than the one that had walked quite through our campsite earlier that day, but still seemed quite comfortable with us.

The trail goes through really beautiful old, open, high forest for a while, mostly flat, old riverbeds and soft leafy soil, and then arrives at a big boulder with a bench. From there, the path is made of bare shale angling up into the air. A rather uncomfortable and unusual path, impossible to walk without shoes. The ground was scrubbier there, and there were several more large boulders with benches, where we stopped to rest. From these you can see Lake Superior over the tops of lots of scrubby trees growing in gravel. Beyond that, a flat shore section with healthier trees.

The hike was probably 3-6 miles in. It hits the coast of the lake at a very extensive campsite, which had a number of sweet chairs made of flat shale chunks arranged around the fire ring. We sat and rested there, eating granola. Then we climbed out on the rocks that were our erstwhile beach. They were big sandstone or shale or whatever sedimentary rocks, with periodic layers of other rocks conglomerated within. They pierced the lake at angles. We tried to force ourselves into the frigid water, being careful not to slip and die on the sharp and algae-covered rocks. We each stayed in only long enough to completely wet ourselves. Words cannot communicate the coldness of this water. All agreed that we felt cleansed and refreshed by our bath, however.

We dried in the sun on our rocks, and then dressed and headed back. The trail was longer going uphill, of course. We rested often, having the best discussions. The conversation the entire week was a shifting canvas of science (mostly ecology, physics, and earth science), math (quantum mechanics and Flatterland), sex (at night, in the tent), Shane's mind, and lots of bullshitting about erosion (our ad hoc deity for the trip), bears and their employment under the DNR (for use as wireless routers, prostitutes and trail guides), etc.

We went back to the store for more ice cream and to fill our water bottles again. On the way back to camp we stopped at an old mine and peeked in. It may have been 6 or 8 or so by that time. We had given up time for the week. We spent the rest of the night on our cliff, shitting around, talking, and eating peanut butter on bread from the store. We also decided to make nature art, inspired by the book we had seen in Ann Arbor. Alex suggested a stream of red rocks leading from a drain in the brick wall off the edge of the cliff. We worked on that until it got too dark, and then lied down on each others' chests and admired the stars. Once it got dark, Shane tried to hype us into a hyper-alert terror for the walk back down to camp. We ended up just really awed by the stars, though, instead. The Milky Way is not as clear as in the pictures, but it is very visible and quite beautiful.

Shane: Lying with starry reflections on our minds, shoulders supporting another's head; this is life. With a cliff drifting closer as twilight fades thicker into clear beauty. A stripe of stars above, from peak to peak, proves everything you ever learned in science class, and yet defies the quantitative. Shifting winds fade into . . . These simple things fill our already-overflowing minds to the brim. , but careful, else our wonder cause us to forget our bodies, kicking down the river of red stones laid over our cliff home. Nature art, we called it as our shirts stain red with rusted dust, to be lain inch by inch our river flows resisting logic, gracing ridges with lakes and valleys with tributaries. But as our banks fade into monochromatic twilight you lay with me and we look up into starry skies. The influence of the Earth shows with bats and satellites crossing the celestial. The night flows shifting as we cross from silver to unknown with forest darkness pierced only by the beams of our electric lamps. The primordial fear fades as lamps are quieted and our eyes fall prey to auditory beauty. Why do we forget that moments away a symphony of the night plays just as grand as the beauty of distant song?

Our beds hard and cold are what greet us to the plastic house, but we resist telling stories and overall bullshit between the three of us no one lies cold. This is our life with discussions of philosophy mixed with that of our sex lives. We are woken by tourists terrorizing our forest's beautiful silence. One by one we stumble into our favorite morning urination stations. The grunt of an empty stomach reminds that there is food to be eaten so bear poles are wrestled until a foggy mind manages to overcome, but the duty of our meal needs a flame. Soon wood . . .

Shane has to finish typing this out at some point. . .

Adam: The valley and the forest become much more spiritual to me at twilight and at night. I have one feeling I associate with the Microphones that I get at this time, listening to the wind in the trees and imaging how eternal that sound is here. Here and at those moments it is easiest to feel the emptiness of the solipsism, to know intimately and intuitively that these mountains, this forest, the wind and rains that shape and shake them, have truly been here for many thousands of years, observed by only itself. Berkeley may have been right, but it is hard to make that knowledge mean anything here (even more than in most places :)) It is a land that "listens to itself," and being here, one feels the depth and breadth of its long, self-sustained existence.

Thursday, July 23 - Shane also has more to type in here but I will summarize what I remember of this morning for the sake of getting this published; shane, you should still oughta fill this in sometime (no pressure though), and I'm sorry to do this without giving you time, etc, but I feel it should be published; most of it is done anyway.

This morning we woke, performed our morning duties of peeing, getting food down from a pole and cooking it (oatmeal, if I remember correctly), and climbing up our cliff. Before deciding on a fixed destination, we drove to Ontonagon in search of raspberries. We ended up with 6 plums instead. Alex finally remembered that he thought the Enclave he had discovered and claimed on his first visit to the UP with his family the previous summer was on the Presque Isle River. This convinced us to set off for it, so we drove out and parked our car and walked down to the river.

The river here is wide, its flow as always jerky, drifting lazily across long shallow expanses and then gushing down steep and criss-crossing falls. We jump and scramble our way across, finding the paths erosion has left us. There is a childish sense of play, of joy, in this - the risk is a necessary ingredient - and even an element of competition. The river has a curious spirit; it is not as calm and deliberate as the land we had become accustomed to at Lake of the Clouds. We know an awe at its age, of course, and in seeing the pools and perfect swirls in the rock worn away by unimaginable volumes of water, it is impossible to think the world is 6000 years old.

We meet a couple, once from Millington, and take their picture. They return the favor. I feel a slight tension, real or imagined, due to the contrast between us, young radicals clambering across the swells, and them, presumably rather placid, conservative middle-aged Christians.

We follow the river all the way down to the lake. Its beauty intensifies as you reach Presque Isle itself, which the river does not actually split to accommodate (making Presque Isle in truth a peninsula). Rather, in the summer at least, the North side blocks the river with a large rock amphitheater: Alex's Enclave. Since the river is forced into a more narrow passage south of the Isle, the water there intensifies, creating countless perfect circles carved out of the rock along the banks by swirls of water. The Isle itself is of course small, and covered by only conifers, which provide a soft bed of needles.

We spent perhaps 45 minutes in the idyllic, intimate perfection of the enclave, taking pictures, eating granola, and absorbing. The water in the enclave (a tiny lagoon, perhaps) contrasts the river and lake with its intense tranquility. It is immobile, less the occasional water strider or fish ripple. The east side is bare shale, while the south side, sloping down from the Isle proper, is vibrantly green. The juxtaposition of intensely green ferns and mosses over gray shale never lost its power over me after all the places we found it. The water obscures a tree trunk crossing the lagoon just under the surface. To the north, there is a steep hill, littered at the bottom with the gray carcasses of fallen trees, victims of landslides. The layout of the banks of the lagoon allow only a hint of sunlight to betray the outlet and Lake Superior's presence to the West.

We headed back up river then, passing a man who told us we could get all the way up to the next insurmountable falls, though there were "a few hairy spots." Shane stayed behind, exhausting the last of our camera battery taking experimental pictures of falling water. Alex and I forged ahead, examining as we went the exquisite patterns in which the shale had crumbled away. We found various little marvels on the banks along the way:
- A tree, fallen horizontal over the river, split perfectly in thirds, with room to stand up in between.
- A wall where the shale crumbles into cubes smaller than your pinky-nail, covered in cobwebs filled with the final molt exoskeletons of adult stoneflies.
- The curved high wall where the bank rises into the cliff of the falls. The floor is littered with massive chunks of fallen shale.
- The side streams of the falls, where the water moves with little enough force to allow slime to cover the wet black shale. The water follows little slime tails, so that if you drag the slime to one side or another, the water will fall along the same path.

Shane reached us soon after we'd gotten to the end there, and then we hurried back to Presque Isle to catch the sunset and get out before dark; we had neglected to bring flashlights from the car. The sunset was obscured by clouds, but the sky a bit further above the horizon still bore that distinctive pastel-vermilion glow.

A few families dabbled in the cold water. We skipped stones and then Shane became distant and romantic. Alex and I waded out and looked for interesting rocks. We left before it was very dark, and got back to camp.

Friday, July 24 - We awoke to a rainy Friday morning at about 11:30. I had left both my sandals and my shoes outside, and they were soaked, so I refused to go outside. Alex joined me in this, and we spent the next few hours reading and cuddling in the tent. Shane, however, had gotten up and walked up to the compost toilet on the cliff to shit. When he got back, he cooked us rice-a-roni for breakfast and ate in the tent with us. He convinced us to get up, that the rain we were still feeling was merely blowing down from the leaves anyway. Alex decided we should see Summit Peak, once considered the highest point in Michigan (until the discovery of two "obscure" mountains in the Huron National Forest).

The decision was motivated by the fact that the highway through the park goes almost all the way up to the peak. We hiked up our cliff, got in the car, got ice cream at the store, and drove to the trailhead. There is a short hike up to the observation structure on the top of the peak. The view is nice, though not particularly impressive for any superlatives. We did see a soaring falcon and some nice clouds (we had also seen a bald eagle twice from our cliff perch).

From there, we continued west on the highway to the Little Carp River Trail. Overlooked Falls, the name from which we had taken inspiration to come here, lay on the Little Carp River, about 100 ft. from the road. We spent about an hour picking our way downstream. The discussion was now more heated than normal, focusing on cultural relativism and the value of Liberalism in the context of non-Western cultures. Shane argued for the inherent value of culture and cultural diversity and accused us of arrogance and limited perspectives. Alex and I argued for Liberalism as an objective good that could benefit any culture without removing its uniqueness. We found some raspberry bushes on an islet, almost as far as we ever ended up going. Most of them weren't ready to eat yet.

We came back on the trail and did in 20 minutes what had taken us an hour to do on the river. We saw three trees with interlocking roots, that had been ripped out of the ground, with the big blackness of soil-around-roots sticking up vertically into the air. The trees in the park consistently showed the effects of the fierce Lake Superior storms.

Upon returning to our campsite, we made our treat dinner, the last meal we would eat in our campsite, Velveeta Macaroni and Cheese, and then roasted marshmallows. Shane tried and failed to make mashed potatoes with the flakes we had brought, and the rest of the box ended up in the fire. We ate, cleaned up, and settled down to sleep.

Saturday, July 25 – We had intended to get up early, at 9, but it was rainy again, so we slept until probably 1 instead. Packing up was disgusting in the mud, but we made quick work of it. The hike back up the hill was not as hard as we'd feared, as we'd taken some of our things up in a previous trip the night before, and we had no food left to haul. We ate in a small diner in Ontonagon, charging the camera battery meanwhile.

After eating we drove up to Houghton and found a really cool JT-esque bookstore with lots of random things on the first floor, like Indonesian idols and pot paraphernalia, thousands of books on the second floor (mostly trashy paperback romance and sci-fi) and a porn section on the third. I bought the Iliad, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Roughing It, by Mark Twain, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Seven Short Novel Masterpieces, and Lolita. Alex got Barbara Ward's Spaceship Earth, What is Science?, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Affluent Society, The New World of Physics, and Kon Tiki. Shane got The Second Sex and a compilation of Liberal Thought. We crossed the bridge into Hancock and spent an hour wandering there, eating ice cream cones and gazing. The whole area feels like Fargo (the movie) to me. Everyone is Finnish, too.

It was cool and there was nothing to do, so we decided to find a coffeeshop somewhere to hole up and read for the evening. We wandered about for awhile, finding several closed down businesses, and ended up at Cyberia Cafe in Houghton. I read Barry Lopez's About This Life, Alex his Philosophy of Science book, and Shane finished Off The Map. At the closing hour, 11 o'clock, we decided to use the time remaining before we were normally tired to get some driving done. Shane and Alex both desired to go to Copper Harbor, so we drove there.

It was during this drive that we discovered our mice. During one of our trips back to Ontonagon, while waiting to be let through a one-way road passage in construction, we saw a mouse scurrying around on the ground by the back left tire of the RV in front of us. When the RV was let through, the mouse couldn't get back on in time, and was left behind. In order to not kill it, I drove slowly, and apparently gave it the window it needed to climb into my car. So that night, driving in the dark and the fog, with rain splattered on the windshield and the hood of my car, we saw little mice scurrying about in the crevice where the windshield meets the hood. They would emerge and scurry about for a bit and then go back down to hide in the depths of my engine.

No one spoke the whole drive, respectful of the enchanted and thickly intimate atmosphere. We listened to the 2nd Imaginary Symphony for Cloudmaking as low-lying clouds encircled our car and slowed us to a more appropriate pace. The world became as big as our car and the dense enclosing wall of trees immediately to either side, a shifting veil of fog revealing and then obscuring the road ahead.

The town was as a haunted New England fishing village, bathed in fog, dead save a few bars, and with a creepy aura, almost a presence of its own. Shane became somewhat paranoid about it, even, and him and Alex kept reminiscing about the Silent Hill games all night. After deciding it would be safe to park and sleep in the lot for people to leave their cars when they take the ferry to Isle Royale (an option for our next camping trip destination), we parked and took a walk. It was quite palpably scary to stand on the boardwalk and look down in the darker-than-inky abyss of Lake Superior in the harbor, as though it would hypnotize us and we'd fall in in spite of ourselves.

We continued down from the ferry harbor to a tiny park guarded by signs warning passers of the terms of use: One could only be there during the day, no alcohol was allowed, etc. There was a small boardwalk there as well, with a ramp and a bench. I wanted to sit on the bench, but Shane had a moment of weakness, so we stayed at the top of the ramp. We were amazed by the tangible physicality of the darkness, its immediacy, as though, since it couldn't be seen, you couldn't trust the abyss to stay as far away as you knew it to be. It was as though the darkness destroyed the horizon, making it so vague that it appeared as a thick bar instead of a line. Upon investigating this site the next morning, we realized that we were actually looking at an island, a strip running parallel to the shore and sheltering the harbor, less than 200 yards away, so deeply swathed in darkness that we had no idea it was there.

Having seen all we could think of to see in Copper Harbor at that hour, we returned to the car and talked each other to sleep, Shane stretched out along the back seat, Alex reclining in the passenger's seat, and me with my head in his lap. We listened for a while to bad middle-of-the-night talk radio on my radio flashlight, which receives little enough signal to make everything sound creepy. We fell asleep to the sound of mice running along the sides and on the roof of the car.

Sunday, July 26 - I woke up stiff, slightly sore on Alex's stomach around midday. Once everyone's head was cleared a bit, we organized the car and drove around looking for a restaurant. There were three: two diner/bar places and one fancy tourist restaurant. I chose the latter, despite financial concerns, and we found that the prices were actually just as low as the diner we'd eaten at in Ontonagon the morning before, if one was smart. It was delicious food, and the only place other than Bennigan's that I've found that serves veggie burgers.

After stopping at a small trinket/bookstore, we left Copper Harbor, stopping by the small cemetery on the way out, and headed for Tahquamenon Falls. The drive took us back the same way we had come, through L'anse and Marquette and Munising. Shane stopped us in Munising and took us to two small mirror-image caves carved out of the sandstone by two waterfalls. They are his favorite waterfalls, and though not large or tall or powerful, they fall delicately, with grace, and have an intimate but also awesome setting.

Before leaving Munising, we stopped in a bookstore Shane and Chantel had frequented during their previous stay there. Shane cites it as the bookstore that helped him fall in love with bookstores. Alex was the only one to find any books (another Barbara Ward). We got hand dip ice cream and left.

We arrived at Tahquamenon Falls around 9. They were a good time, but we were chased away by mosquitoes. Instead of stopping somewhere to sleep, I decided to drive all the way back to Saginaw that night. We put on Of Natural History, in the dark, and didn't speak until the Mackinaw Bridge. The mice were still there and moving around outside at that point. We decided to stop and eat in Mackinaw City, and stopped at a random restaurant called the Blue Water Grill.

Shane stayed in the car talking to Tess while Alex and I went in and got a table and ordered. Alex noticed first that the waitress had an accent, so I then asked her where she was from, and got into a nice conversation. Her name is Agne, and her and the busgirl are from Lithuania, in Mackinaw City on work exchange through a private agency. We talked with her over the course of the night, until the kitchen closed and Shane finally came in to eat our leftovers.

She asked if Alex and I lived in Mackinaw City or if we were staying the night there, and Alex later said she was probably going to invite us out if we had been. I told him the only place they would invite us was clubbing or drinking, and he was skeptical and accused me of generalizing and being prejudicial. I asked her if they had found many things to do to keep busy or been able to meet people here, and she said that while there weren't any clubs here, they found bonfires and parties to go to. She went on to say that they didn't have much free time, as they were both working like 11 hours a day and were constantly tired. They had made one trip to Chicago, however, and were working a lot to be able to travel once more before they return to Lithuania in September (they were here from June to September). I left her a $20 tip to support their endeavors, and she was very excited when she saw it. I was frustrated at myself, because I could only remember the names of Tallinn and Riga, the capitals of Lithuania's neighbors Estonia and Latvia, and not Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. She was impressed, either way.

These kind of events are the things that make me hypothesize wildly about mystical ideas like God and predestination. They are really bizarre instances of synchronicity, coincidences, and are really nice aspects of life.

We drove back to Saginaw and slept soundly until the next morning.

Monday, July 27 - Shane and I drove back to Cass City rather early but not too early the next morning. We spent a few hours on the somewhat overwhelming task of emptying the car, sorting things out, throwing away trash, cleaning and drying things, and cleaning the car. Shane was incredibly kind and vacuumed my car for me while I sorted all of my junk.

Chronicle Article

2009-07-30T18:23:00.003-05:00

Hey Guys, this is done provisionally now. Check it for style, grammar, spelling, etc, and content most of all. Where is it missing things? Are you convinced? I am going to send it to the Chronicle and perhaps other local papers. And of course to the Rotarians. Enjoy. ?

Dear reader,

I have recently returned from an 11 month exchange in Mexico through the Rotary Youth Exchange Program. This experience is typically described as "the best year of your life." Though this may not be strictly true in my case, it is nonetheless not an exaggeration in the strength of feeling it conveys. You don't really realize what is going on on the other side when you see an Exchange Student in Cass City. It is something you really must experience for yourself. You see everything from a completely different angle, and in general, appreciate most things more.

Mexico is a beautiful country with delicious food and gracious people. I could write about the general differences I have observed between Americans and Mexicans, but this would be purely anecdotal, prejudicial, and wouldn’t necessarily do good in any sense. Instead, I would like to make a case for you and your children to go on exchange programs and to travel in general.

After being accepted into the Rotary Youth Exchange Program (don't worry, it is not difficult to get in), you go through several meetings during the course of the year prior to your exchange. These meetings put you together with the Inbounds (students here from other countries) here in your District, the Rebounds (students who have come back from exchange), and the Outbounds (students who will be on exchange all over the world when you are). The meetings are run by the excellent Rotary volunteer staff, who keep in contact with the Outbounds all year when they are on exchange and help with any problems that come up. The meetings offer training for both students and their parents, providing information and exercises that try to emulate the challenges you may face during your exchange. At one of these meetings, you have to rank the 40-some available host countries from first to last. Some time later, you will be assigned a host country and a host Rotary Club, where you will live and attend high school.

During your exchange year, you will live with three different host families, meet and befriend all the other exchange students from all over the world in your district, and go on Rotary trips, an extremely economical way to see the most beautiful parts of the world, with friends. Almost every district or region offers a trip; some are more elaborate than others (Brazil's trip is nearly a month long) but all of them are extremely worthwhile, and they are quite affordable. It would be a shame to go on exchange and not take the trip, and the Host Rotary Club can and will almost always help kids with raising the money if they need it. Rotary Youth Exchange is run entirely by volunteers, and the Rotarians are very gracious and enthusiastic people who can do incredible things. They take excellent care of their exchange students and do what they do for the most altruistic reasons. They want to share their lives and culture with the students from the bottom of their hearts.

The reasons why you should go on exchange are plentiful and convincing. The unexpected benefits, the surprises (a good friend you keep in contact with the rest of your life, a love of salsa music, or even the discovery of a sense of purpose; one girl, seeing the conditions of refugees from Burma in Thailand, has dedicated herself to working for the UN Refugee Agency and improving conditions for these people), are after all the best part of the exchange. Testimonials are the most direct evidence of the worth of the exchange year, but they depend on a trust, and an established relationship I unfortunately do not and couldn't really have with you, my unknown reader. So, I will try to articulate, as best I can, the value of travel and youth exchange in particular.

The first and simplest of these is merely that exchange, through Rotary in particular, is a great opportunity. It is one of the cheapest ways to travel (as little as $1,500 during the entire year; food and school are paid for by the host families and Rotary Clubs), it provides an indispensable immersion and intimacy with the culture that is impossible to find as a tourist, and is a fantastic educational deal; the traditional schooling you receive in your host country may not be worth anything at all (it wasn't in my case) but there are things you gain on exchange that can't be taught in a classroom. I believe that exchange is an essential component of a truly broad, modern, international education.

An exchange shows you directly that there really is a huge, wide world out there, something that is easy to forget in the complacent nose-to-the-ground routine of daily life. It shows you that other people do really view things in fundamentally different ways, and that, in most cases, there is no "right" or "wrong" to this. It teaches you not to reject or discredit things because they are foreign or seem "backwards." You come back from exchange seeing your culture and the world in a more objective light: you have no depth perception seeing with only one eye.

Exchange was an experience that helped me to mature and grow as a person. I am more comfortable talking to people and more outgoing and forward with them. Since I have been back, I have performed a marimba solo in front of 1200 people at the Rotary Central States Youth Exchange Conference, and given a presentation to the local Rotary club, saying most of the same things I am saying here. These are things I would have been nervous and uncomfortable doing before, but felt completely relaxed and normal now. On exchange, no one knows you. You have the chance to rebuild your character from scratch in a way that is not possible among people who have established preconceptions of you. You constantly have to explain who you are to curious people in your host country, and in answering them, you learn more about yourself. It is wonderful to have strangers genuinely interested in who you are and where you are from, and what things are like there. Finding people baffled by things you always took for granted in your own culture shows the significance of cultural differences as well as the potential for disparate behaviors and beliefs in human nature.

Now that you know why you should go on exchange, let me preempt your doubts and excuses. First of all, logistical concerns, regarding college admissions, regarding high school credits, regarding missing a year of anything, etc, should be dismissed out of hand. These things are not difficult to work out and are easily worth the trouble. The only other real objection that comes up is something we all feel, some more than others, and is essentially something we each need to overcome individually: laziness and fear of the unknown. I am pretty bad about this and was much worse as a child. My father made an implacable, titanic effort to destroy this in me, and it is because of him I went to Mexico. This lethargy - the impulse to stay at home where it is familiar and easy - is what keeps us from completing our dreams, from being ambitious, and from seeing the beauty of the world and the people in it.

Most of you, of course, will never have the opportunity to go on exchange. However, there are plenty of other ways to get involved and to become a part of the wonder that it is. Youth Exchange Officers (YEO) is always looking for host families to host Inbounds. Hosting an exchange student brings a new member into your family, and illustrates vividly the existence of the world outside. It provides a unique opportunity to look into another person's life and history, a history that is typically drastically different from those of the people around you. Each of the exchange students my family has hosted has given as much to us as we have to them. The same principle holds true for high school students: make a point of seeking out the exchange students in your school and talking to them. They are some of the most interesting people in school with you, if only because of their unique perspective and background (though typically not only for those reasons).

If I have piqued your interest about exchange, all you need to do to get started is get in touch with your local Rotary YEO. I would also love to talk to you and give you more information from my experience, and you should feel free to contact me. My email address is a2008174@hotmail.com. In Cass City, my mom, Debra Kranz, is the YEO, and you can reach her either by email at debrakranz@yahoo.com or by calling us at home at 872-4215. Rotary Clubs typically have phone numbers listed in the beginning of the phone book, and if not, asking a few local businesspeople should find someone who can put you in touch with a Rotarian. More information is also available at the Central States Youth Exchange Website: www.csrye.org. If you are interested, the journal I kept of my personal experience on exchange in Mexico is available at adamjameskranz.blogspot.com.

Love,

Adam

A longstanding disposition, an art project, and a list

2009-07-27T15:36:00.005-05:00

1. Since at least the fifth grade, but possibly 3rd-4th, I have felt weighted by my own uselessness. Never before have I tried to explain it, its particulars, or its general mentality, as it has always seemed so very base to me and thus only its extensions were fully fleshed in thoughts. This uselessness goes beyond my triviality and right into the function of things without me. I describe it now as an extended evaluation of relationships.

2. It came up, finally, in my attempt to name an art piece. The piece is much in the same vein of this thought-- a comparison of the personal and the public mentalities as a tool for exploring the nature of the human and its relationship with history, fragility, and what we deem as 'the world'.

3. The piece in question:
Two suitcases, clearly used and aged, but not antique by any means. They lay on their broad sides, top open, and they are filled with water. They sit like this in the solitude of a white, four-walled installation room. A microphone covered by plastic baggies lies hidden in each, amplifying every disturbance an approach might cause in a soft sort of whale-call of technology.
The suitcases sit on top of a very thin layer of sand and dirt. A fairly even mix. It tapers off at the room's edges.
It is silent for the most part, as it takes real approach, real vibration, real movement to stir the water. On light, low levels, the sound is subtle and almost seems false. The lighting is dim enough to avoid the whiteness of the walls and echos of light proving distraction.

4. Now that you have some sort of inherent visual, I will supply the meaning, thereby bridging another gap between my opening and the cause: art.
It is about the concept of homebound and belonging, and therefor about reason of being. Beyond that, and also related to that, it is about the Persona. There is everything/there is you. It is the push-and-pull, the tug between the Personal and the Whole.
This is, essentially, a Scale Shift alongside a Refocus.

The weight of water and its location in a suitcase suggests baggage and the wight of personal history and experience. Weight for our histories and for everything that is deemed 'personal'. The weight of the suitcases, filled as they are with water, indeed would be much for a person to carry. But just looking at it, the suitcase is also a simple container and water is a fluid representational of life and continuity and the Masses, the Greater Whole. Humans, after all, are composed largely of H2O, and in that sense, histories are almost erased. They are meaningless. Water looks clear, empty. It is largely tasteless, which ironically also makes it a prime candidate for the tint of personality. It is basic. It is a common compound. Going beyond people, it is also one of the key aspects of Earth and out world.

Water is fit, because of this, to represent a spirit of the world, of the times, and also right, when made personal by association of memories and the single existence mentality, to represent just that- the individual and the particulars that come with him/her. This latter here mocks the former, rendering it useless in the overall.

The sand allows for imprinting. A single visitor will leave solid footprints. However, upon multiple visits or a number of people, the footprints become shapeless, formless... shadows of histories. They mash each other up into oblivion, again erasing anything personal and copying the waves of the ocean in their various peaks and dips. Another sea.

It is a swift denial of the concept of the Spirit of the People and a questioning of the weight and importance of the individual, the personal. It is an admittance of defeat alongside a cheer, alongside an earnest attempt at creating a self-definition despite this. It is continuation in the face of utter fact, utter science, and the sheer simplicity of being. Something so unimportant, and yet to us, it is everything. We are our own everything and without us, we all have nothing, even if without us, the world creaks on.

A part of the world was born with you. Even though it doesn't leave when you're gone.

5. Now comes the thing that birthed this post.
It started as a list to draw a title from, but after two, it became a list for the sake of listing.

"A list based on a sudden urge to tag and isolate something ingrained in my beliefs but never considered beyond its more complicated extensions in my thoughts and mentality"

The world without you would be different, but it really couldn't care
The world without you would be different, but everything else would be the same
The world without you would be different, but it probably wouldn't matter to the world
The world without you would be different, but so what?
The world without you would be different, but it's changing anyway
The world without you would be different, but it wouldn't know to care
The world without you would be different, but that's as far as it goes
The world without you would be different, but it would be indifferent to this
The world without you would be different, but it would probably feel the same
The world without you would be different, but it's different with you, too
The world without you would be different, but only as different as anything else
The world without you would be different, maybe.

The point is summed up in a continued list as follows:

Your life is only vital to you and you aren't a necessary factor to anything else.
-You aren't a necessary factor to being. Things exist with or without you.
We are the only ones who know how much we matter.
(To us, without us, everything changes. Everything dies.)
We can stand out to ourselves, but we are just standing to the world.
I take comfort in the fact that, just as I don't matter, I matter just as much as anyone and anything. We Live as Factors, all of us.

6. A side note: Upon further examination in regards to this post, what is of interest to me is the natural inclination to express these things which I have skimmed over in favor of the things they relate to. This is the joy of art: not only expression, but expression that causes enlightenment. Art is not born from enlightenment always, but some vague idea of it. Some swirling of identification and Truth. What comes from the art, instead, is the Enlightenment. Things known become Known and then around them, tiny connections spread. Roots. All your seedlings were siblings, after all, and whether or not you want to water them outright, your mind urges you to spill some drops. You had it there all along and whether or not you planned to cultivate, whatever you do, whatever you're passionate about doing, whatever you express is a spill. Whatever you think is a Sprout and it has Roots and everything about you, it turns out, is just one Thing. Which is funny because it exudes an air of importance and dignity and Future and yes, I was speaking earlier of how none of us in particular are Future, but I have to admit once more that, at the same time, you are Future, and I am Future, and even though we might not have been, we are, and that is something.

yesterday pt. one

2009-07-14T12:20:00.001-05:00

Walking through a hometown to get my pedal bike, the wind pushing at my back, I felt the pull of friendship. New and old with the middle meeting my at her greeting place, an unsteady deck half in a glass door. Wide eyed hugs say hello as I am asked in, for at least a little while. As we wait for the brewing coffee to pass through calcium lined pipes I play rock band with her cousin, synthetic instruments almost connecting the beat between us. Ringing cell phone reminds me that this was not a visit but only a passing moment and so we shared a half brewed pot overly creamed and minimally sugared. This gentle joy of conversation in sunlit rooms over steaming cups reminds me that even a passing moment can last a lifetime. And then with empty cups we say goodbye with a promise of return delivered through hug.

Camp Post 2009

2009-07-08T14:45:00.004-05:00

So, camp information:

I am thinking the best of all possible camping can only be done in the heart of the Porcupine Mountains State Park. The place is so beautiful, Adam you have not been there, Shane have you? Once we get to Ontonagan, we secure for 14USD a group backcountry camping permit. From that point we can camp wherever we want within the wilderness area without charge. We can pitch tents wherever, so long as we are away from the trails, or other campsites or cabins - must be roughly 1200 feet away I guess. If we wish - and what would be best - is to secure for ourselves a campsite, as fire building is only allowed in the metal rings at each campsite. There are no reservations for the basic "backcountry campsites", they are free and "first come first serve", and there are 63 of them within the park. But apparently they are not sharable, I have no idea why, but the max capacity is 4 individuals per site or "one family". That's us.

We have to comply with "no impact" and "pack in pack out" policies, where everything we take in we have to take out, with no exceptions, except for human waste itself - apparently we are expected to take out and properly dispose of used toilet tissue? And we are expected to retrieve any litter we come accross and properly dispose of it outside the park. (Do they hate freedom?)

At the campsites, there are basically no anemeties besides the fire rings and a bear pole, for securing food bags above and away from the camp. So we would have to take along filters and a pot for boiling nonfiltered water. Is this what we want? I am certainly in higher favor of being Thrust into the Breast of Nature Hisself, but I don't know about anyone else, as this means Shitting in Nature and Drinking from Stream. What are preferences?

Anyway, read these, anyone who wants to go; they outline the various park policies and include equipment recommendations and tips (Here is a camping packing list of things to list on packing for camping):

http://www.michigandnr.com/publications/pdfs/RecreationCamping/Porkies_WC%20summer_2.pdf

General Camping Tips:

http://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0,1607,7-153-10365_10883-31426--,00.html

Here is the Michigan DNR page on the Porcupine Mountains State Park:

http://www.michigandnr.com/parksandtrails/Details.aspx?type=SPRK&id=426

Is this the plan here, Adam?:

http://www.mapquest.com/maps?1c=Saginaw&1s=MI&1z=48604&2c=Interlochen&2s=MI

A map of the campsites within the park. If it were up to me I'd say we should maybe switch sites halfway or so through the trip for a Change of Scenery? For instance, two nights High In the Hills and two on the shore of Lake Superior? How many nights are we staying?:

http://www.michigan.gov/documents/dnr/07porkies_backcountry-brochure__map_184899_7.pdf

The park's manual on Leaving No Traces:

http://www.michigandnr.com/publications/pdfs/RecreationCamping/Porkies_LNT_Manual.pdf

____________________

So: is there a plan? Who make it, I write it?

I'm thinking that on the 20th we ought to leave as oily as possible (early), either from Interlochen if we go there or from Saginaw if Adam and Shane stay here the 19th why not is that possible? We get to the town of Ontonagan as oily as possible on the 20th, which could be anytime depending on where we leave that morning (although the trip from Interlochen should be roughly a 7.5 hour drive and the drive from Saginaw there without Interlochen would be 8.25 hours, so there isn't a big difference either way.) So, we get to Ontonagan, head west to Silver City about 14 miles, where we Stock Up on food, and anything we need that we may have forgotten to bring. Then it's approximentally 2 miles to the park, where we go to the visitor's center and get camping permits (it may be a $14 flat rate or $14 per night, I have read conflicting thinguses), then we park and Hike Into God's Country, and hopefully find an open campsite before dark. We have a good time and go camping.

Is this a good or a bad plan?

Shane you have a Billion Years experience more than I do at this, suggest something you square.

Video de Musica

2009-07-07T12:13:00.003-05:00

Inspiration from yesterday night: music video suggestions?

The black kids- Look at me (When I Rock Wichoo)

CSS- Music is my hot hot sex

Poni Hoax- Antibodies

Matt and Kim- Daylight

Merideth Monk- Book of Days

Peter Bjorn and John- Young Folks

MGMT- Electric Feel

The Wombats- Let's Dance to Joy Division

Ladytron- Runaway & Ghosts

Regina Spektor- Fidelity & Laughing With

Of Montreal- Wraith Pined to the Mist, Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse & An Eluardian Instance

Ben Folds (featuring Regina Spektor)- You Don't Know Me

Architecture In Helsinki - That Beep

(for trey) The M's - Big Sound

I Guess in the end this is just a Music Video Suggestion Box, so suggest away...

I laughed, like a boss.

2009-06-30T09:26:00.001-05:00

Ad Hominem Arguments

2009-06-20T22:20:00.002-05:00

This isn't really anything that will provoke any discussion, because it's really obvious and not at all contentious, but I am going to indulge and write about it anyway.

Everyone knows what ad hominem arguments are and why they can't be used: An ad hominem argument attacks the person and not their argument. I can't say to Sylvie, "Capitalism is bad because you're a Spintly Bist." (nor because Sylvie plays Bassoon, nor because she lives in Canada, and not even because she has poor rhetorical skills, poor spelling, or because she's a girl). An argument isn't a "fight" to establish dominance; it is a group effort to find an acceptable provisional truth or agreement. Therefore, everyone involved is merely a mouthpiece, an advocate, for a point of view, and the outcome of the argument essentially has nothing to do with what is really true. Incidentally, this is true of any action, passion, thing, social phenomenon, etc.

The other aspect of what I have been referring to as "ad hominem reasoning" is the opposite of the above: judging a person by their beliefs, their actions, their clothes, their friends, etc, simply doesn't work. What DO you use to judge a person, then? Nothing - people aren't to be judged. It is impossible to do in practice, but I think it is important to approximate. There is no such thing as a good or a bad person; it may be true that everything we do is decided before we are born, but no judgement can be made of the sum of those actions.

I was going to say something more, but I will just sum up now: everything related to a person's life should be judged completely separately. Hitler killed people, painted, liked dogs, was a vegetarian, had hair, and none of these things are at all morally related. I mean this only in a moral sense, of course. There is plenty of value scientifically or culturally in comparing how many mass murderers like dogs or what they eat. And of course it is the conjunction of these elements that make an individual fascinating and unique.

Quickly wrapped with newspaper

2009-06-20T21:36:00.002-05:00

Cultural intake with titles relevant to the world and this hot, free season:

A video game worth playing- World of Goo

A book worth reading- Europeana: A Brief History of the 20th Century

A movie worth watching- Summer Hours (in theaters)

- My Summer of Love (rentable)

A song worth hearing- Headlights, "Cherry Tulips"

ah, you say, no world and no summer! But wait, I respond, do cherry tulips not make you think of love? of happiness? of summertime?

Maybe I did cheat. Let's give this round to the plant life. To make it up to you, I offer a botanist's twofer... TV on the Radio's "Family Tree" makes it a double.

A song worth seeing- Matt and Kim, "Daylight"

here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgBeu3FVi60

Oh, come on! This is totally a summer song.

Last night was an excellent night for my dreaming mind. I wonder at the expanse of thoughts and information my brain must be seeking to prune.

This post is just to show I care... I hope you know that "I want the sea, I want the whole sea, for you and me."

Lovecraft

2009-06-19T13:34:00.002-05:00

I am not too great at recommendations but I highly recommend H. P. Lovecraft. He is considered one of the founders of horror and seems to be one of the only authors who still has the ability to bring me to the brink of madness.

Wikipedia page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft

Mytho's writing- Lovecraft inspired
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

An Intense HIP Camp Dream

2009-06-16T18:27:00.003-05:00

I have just dreamed the most intense dream I have had in months:

I have somehow managed to get to percussion camp this summer, but it is being held in some big city. We are all coming in on bus together to the hotel where we are staying, and things are very frantic. It is already late at night. I lose one of my duffel bags getting off the bus. There are TONS of people in the lobby of the hotel (an old, white, fancy building, like a mansion reclaimed as a hotel), including Mark Partain. Some people end up going to sleep and others ask for permission to stay up and watch a soccer game. I may be not tired or out of character or something but decide to stay up and watch the game. I on two distinct points get up to go to the bathroom. The first, I find a bathroom on the same floor, with a normal, easy layout. The next, I find a bathroom constructed in a very claustrophobic space, with several small floor sections with about a foot's descent between them. I fear I will faint and be unable to ever get out.

The next morning, we are assigned our pieces and set to work running through them. I am assigned to a piece with a number of college students, directed by Cory Wagner. Another piece begins rehearsing before we have even got our equipment together; it is a gigantic piece directed by Mr. Zerbe. Somehow dream-shift and this is a piece everyone is going to play on. It's a really big deal, something with huge emotional depth on the scale of an opera or a big tone poem or something. It is a program work based on a novel, some extremely well-written and gigantic work on the order of Gravity's Rainbow inspired by a novel based on Alice in Wonderland (that is, it is a third generation work; our piece being perhaps a fourth, and I saw no references to AiW in our production).

It is also a very scary piece of music, and at this point we begin playing it and I see images (we are going to perform as though it were an opera, with actors and props and such). A man is standing in a field, and a series of grotesque, anthropomorphic riders come galloping by (these are known to be the man's nightmares. I am somehow then set to work constructing the man's house for the next section. I don't get very far. Presumably we have a lunch break or something, then, and I set to talking to some person (serving here only as a listener) about the fact that I, a long time ago, had started the secondary novel (the one our piece's inspiration was based on), but had never finished it. I then picked up that book and started reading.

Transition to the plot of said book (which I was sure actually existed in real life and is something my father has shown me). I begin as a man with some psychological disorder, paranoia definitely and some form of autism perhaps? I spend all of my time in libraries searching for something. I wake up then, but I know the book ends with some half-way scary dystopian ending with the protagonist in the Kingdom of Hearts.

I wonder if there is really a book like the one I dreamed; if any of you know of it, let me know. I kind of doubt it, but there are tons of books based on Alice, so maybe? Taking reading recommendations from dreams has always been a good idea. There is, however, this movie, by Jan Svankmajer.

Empty Frame

2009-06-15T21:37:00.001-05:00

Forever gone, but never forgotten. With words online the ghostly glint of her far foregone face winks with the infinite. Is that feedback or does she love me? The tears she cries when I leave tell me that she was once living in these arms and now is dying to get back in them. Always and forever she says before waxing on incredible. Where did she go? call dropped again with voices floating ethereal into and out of a mobile-2-mobile plan. I am picked up, empty frame saying that a thread mistress summoned her to the other place. The international or interstate are obstacles to be overcome with her smile. Instead of place I have time, time to see the future blossom in this hopeful present. Crazed parents speak of the now, of needing the other. If the truth is forged in fatherly words then this beautiful dream of mine is a lie to be replaced with his glorious xxx truth. Deny deny and deny again to the end of time and then you will be mine the girl of my future. In a week or only a simple tomorrow there will a girl in these arms that fulfills the hole left in this empty frame.

Things of Late

2009-06-13T21:09:00.003-05:00

I have used the internet lately to find a variety of interesting and awful things. I have not found them myself, per se, but rather, my network of contacts has brought them to my attention.

The first of this is the most important. My good friend Lorna brought this to my attention, and it is one of the most beautiful, awe-inspiring things I have ever seen. It is called Home and is available for free viewing online. Very much worth the time to watch it. I know I urge you all to view tons of beautiful things you hate to watch because you are poisoned by their beauty, but this is worth the pain.

In a similar theme, I found this article from Scientific American (which I used to have a subscription to). It is about a thing I have thought a lot about lately, and has a lot of useful observations, even if it isn't very creative or insightful.

I found these next three things on Facebook.

Wolfram Alpha is a supercomputer. It is fascinating but it's still in its initial phases I understand. There is also a music creator that makes music based on mathematical patterns. It is complicated to understand what it actually does but some interesting things come out. Play with it?

There are two ghost sites:
Ghosts of America seems to be a bunch of formulaic computer-generated ghost legends that don't really exist. They are hilarious.

Bogey Bridge is a real bridge in Cass City, though I've never been, and it is true that it has a reputation for Scary. I know one of the girls responsible for this. It's a lot of fun.

I have been inspired today, by some old familiar things and one new brilliant thing.
The summer Percussion Camp at Alma College has been a staple of my summers since I began High School, and it was the influence that pushed me from Mr. Burtch's high school band program to Interlochen and a serious pursuit of musical excellence. Crates is just badass as hell, but Pat Metheny's Heat of the Day is perhaps the most intense musical experience of my life (that is, seeing it live). Steve Martin (a great guy)'s arrangement of it is much better than the original, which was already awesome.

The other was Into the Wild, a movie I believe Beverly tried to get me to see when it came out but I never had the chance. I just downloaded it and watched it tonight. It was probably one of the best and most inspiring movies I have ever seen. I have read about and dreamed about doing things like that for years now, and though I don't think my parents deserve what he did to his, that's not really a necessity for the essence of what he did. I plan to read the book this summer. Has anyone ever read Krakauer's Everest book? One of my all time Favorite movies right now.

Le Morte d'Arthur

2009-06-08T13:23:00.005-05:00

Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur is another one of those books I started reading back before my computer got here and gave up after that. To be fair, though, the circumstances are a bit different. I took it to school one day in March and read the first 100 pages (of 512) and got too much of an itch to play some medieval period video game, and decided to wait until my computer got here. At that point I did resume reading it on and off, and just finally finished it Wednesday.

Having already read T.H. White's excellent The Once and Future King earlier this year, which was based on Le Morte, the book itself felt like an elementary school boy had written 500 pages from the same plot outline. Apart from a few people, no character has any depth; plots are always resolved with deux ex machina; women are not only treated as property by men, but are in fact depicted to have the mindset of cattle (that is, if they are not deceivers tempting honorable knights to commit adulterous acts); any hermit or priest can perfectly interpret any dream or vision; noble/royal blood is taken as a legitimate indication of skill, and Malory finds it justifiable that knights should treat peasants poorly; all the knights act on an absurd honor system that defied my attempts to understand it; and a large part of the book is dedicated to sorting out who is the best knight.

Malory seems to have lived a life far more interesting than his book; from Wikipedia: "Few facts are certain in Malory's history. He was probably born sometime around 1405 (though some scholars have suggested an earlier date). He died in March of 1471, less than two years after completing his lengthy book. Twice elected to a seat in Parliament, he also accrued a long list of criminal charges during the 1450s, including burglary, rape, sheep stealing, and attempting to ambush the Duke of Buckingham. He escaped from jail on two occasions, once by fighting his way out with a variety of weapons and by swimming a moat. Malory was imprisoned at several locations in London, but he was occasionally out on bail. He was never brought to trial for the charges that had been levelled against him. In the 1460s he was at least once pardoned by King Henry VI, but more often, he was specifically excluded from pardon by both Henry VI and his rival and successor, Edward IV. It can be construed from comments Malory makes at the ends of sections of his narrative that he composed at least part of his work while in prison."

It may be that I lost some of the atmosphere by reading Keith Baines' modern English translation of the work; it retains all the thees and thous, but uses a completely accessible vocabulary. I doubt it, though. Most of the reviewers on GoodReads found it better than I did, but I would still not recommend any of you ever read it. Stick with White.

There is one interesting incident I would like to bring up, that hopefully will provoke some discussion. Sir Bors, adventuring during the quest for the Holy Grail, encounters a lady who claims to be madly in love with him and beseeches him to lay down with her. This would constitute a violation of his Vow of Chastity of course, and he refuses her.

""Sir Bors, you refuse, and my life must be forfeit! Come, and I will show you."
So saying, the lady led twelve of her gentlewomen up to the battlements, where they stood on the very edge, prepared to leap.
"Sir Bors, good knight! have mercy upon us! Yield to our lady or else we must all leap to our death, and surely you will be shamed forever."
Sir Bors was aghast at the sight, for these ladies were all beautiful and richly clothed; and yet he was not without prudence, and determined that rather they should lose their souls than he his."

Now, Sir Bors, as a knight, has taken a vow to protect all ladies. In another situation, Sir Bors leaves his brother to die in order to save a noblewoman he does not know because of that vow. I am not sure about with regards to theology, because theology is the most ridiculously convoluted subject, but this little bit reminded me a Borges story, and I would like to make a comparison.

In Borges' Three Versions of Judas, he plays Theologian, and invents a man named Runeberg to voice his thoughts. The relevant bits:

"In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendor. Judas elected those offenses unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence (John 12 :6) and informing. He labored with gigantic humility; he thought himself unworthy to be good. Paul has written: Whoever glorifieth himself, let him glorify himself in the Lord. (I Corinthians 1:31); Judas sought Hell because the felicity of the Lord sufficed him. He thought that happiness, like good, is a divine attribute and not to be usurped by men."

"The general argument is not complex, even if the conclusion is monstrous. God, argues Nils Runeberg, lowered himself to be a man for the redemption of the human race; it is reasonable to assume that thesacrifice offered by him was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by any omission. To limit all that happened to the agony of one afternoon on the cross is blasphemous. . . . God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible - all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain web of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus; He chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas."

Thus, the question is, should not Sir Bors, having sworn an oath to protect women, have sacrificed his own immortal soul to save those of the noblewomen? This is something I have run into in discussion with Christians before (I once had a girl tell me she would not deny her belief in or love of Jesus Christ to save the life of her beloved niece; as though God wouldn't know she was faking it). I suppose this really depends on whether you interpret the rewards and punishments or the moral system itself to be the final End of Christian morality. If the first is the case, Sir Bors did the right thing, simply because the moral rules he follows are only a means in his personal quest to Heaven. If the latter is true, then Christianity should demand he sacrifice his chastity to save the noblewomen.

Of course, in the book itself, none of this is really an issue. The entire situation was a facade created by Satan to lure Sir Bors into compromising himself, and he simply has to cross himself to make the castle and all the women disappear.

I also read Borges' Ficciones this weekend, in Spanish. I got through the whole 216 page book in four days, without using a dictionary, and without any real trouble or slowdowns. There were plenty of words I didn't know, but I could guess their meaning through context usually. It may have helped that I have read all of these stories at least once before in English. I have already talked about Borges, and there is nothing in Ficciones that wasn't in Labyrinths. Just go read him already! I am planning a binge of Borges and Borges-related books when I get home.

Parenting

2009-06-03T22:09:00.003-05:00

I have had this issue tossing around in my head for a long time, and recent family situations have brought it into the fore again. It is essentially an application of the basic principles of Anarchism to the traditions of the institution of parenthood, especially its manifestation in modern society. This may seem like a very radical and counter-intuitive thing at first, but you will realize that parenting methods vary widely and are widely debated.

The basic idea of Anarchism, of course, is that one person has no better access to truth in science or morality or anything else than any other. This means that no one can tell anyone else what to do, and invalidates all power structures, which includes that of parents and a child. It goes against all common sense to say an adult has less access to real truth than a newborn baby, and yet this is the case, and this is what we must act on.

The question here is, where is the line? What degree of control and influence should parents exert over their children? Creating a person does not give you rights over them, but it does perhaps give you responsibilities to them. Is there any way to parent in a way that does not exert control over children? These are of course very vague questions, and I doubt any of you will try to answer them because of that.

The biggest, most clear question I would like to discuss is thus, however: What attitude should parents take to their children committing victimless "crimes," and at what age should a parent no longer try to stop this behavior, if ever? I can't imagine anyone will try to claim that we ought to use legal status as an adult as a guide. But when is it right for a parent to prohibit a child from drinking soda, smoking cigarettes, viewing pornography, listening to vulgar music, involving themselves in foolish self-destructive activities, or any of the multitude of activities parents may consider self-damaging, but that adults have the right to do? Is there any difference here between the attitude a parent should take to their child and the attitude they take to everyone else they care about? The difference, without trying to quantify caring, seems to lie solely in the power a parent holds over their own child. Is it right for a parent to raise their child as a vegetarian?

I have tentatively arrived at the conclusion that children should be raised and treated as friends, such that all of their needs are cared for, they are respected, and they experience the most open-minded intellectual and moral environment possible. I feel that I was blessed to grow up in a household without any clear ideological system other than love and respect, and feel that that should and could be given to all children. As for dietary issues, a parent has no reason to cook food they wouldn't eat themselves for their children as long as the child is well-nourished. That does not mean a vegetarian's child would be a vegetarian against their will; it simply means that their parents would not buy them meat or cook it for them in their house.

This probably seems rather out of nowhere. That's fine. Start a good, lively discussion now, please.

Pedalbike Romance

2009-06-01T15:21:00.002-05:00

Pouring words like a waterfall fall from the mouth of a friend, sculpting the world around us to a more suitable form. Barking dogs becoming deep bass as the song of the wind tears away the smog of buildings. In this concert of our life the car blinkers all turn to the left forever far away. Fragmented bricks fall away as the substance of reality comes away with a little rain cooling our hot bodies. Her face is not her own any longer as she tells the story of far away lovers living in the trees of an ancient forest. the hard read softens into Neptune's love and we begin to swim our bikes, never allowing the world to betray us. Our dreams spill from our forgotten nights into our barren days with little regard for the contours of this world. The colors shift as the mountains push up with us in the back of a reinforced wood truck driven by a swagger of a man lifting our bodies through a perpetual desert of his truck's creation. There was never a war that tore this world apart as thoroughly as this gentle story of lovely discontents with gun in hand my friend murdered me, only to pull the curtains clear revealing the twin suns of her heart. With a kiss the story shifts to broken romances. We clear the horizon and see that the end came in fire as the icy moon sets over the endless sea. This world could never contain the rhythm of bodies on the treetop dance floor. We spell out letter by letter the names of forgotten lovers as they forget the fire of the icy night in ancient masks. Our hearts beat in unison with our pedals pulling us closer to the story's end. With treadmarks betraying our path, a truck informs us that the road is for motors only. Blood telling the story of our final moment; she is cradled in broken arms , as I finish her story by pulling down the moon showing her that the fire in my eyes is of her creation.

Leaves of Grass

2009-05-31T06:00:00.003-05:00

I started reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass on March 13; I have just finished it now, because it is a 588 page book and because I pretty much didn't read during April and most of May.

Walt Whitman was born today in 1819 (that means, today is his birthday. Everyone wishes Walt Whitman a Happy Birthday!). He was strongly influenced by the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and set out to become the True American Poet that Emerson called for in his essay "The Poet." He then wrote the epic poem for the rest of his life, with its first publication appearing in 1845. Subsequent editions included the original material and added what had been written since. Whitman paid for the printing of the first several editions himself. Sylvie mentioned a discrepancy reading the length of the book; I seem to have the last and fullest version available, while she must have an earlier edition, since she has only some 200 pages.

I quite enjoyed Leaves of Grass at first. It is intended to be and succeeds at being the poetic incarnation of Transcendental philosophy. While Whitman is (to my philistine tastes) not necessarily a good poet, then, there are dozens of passages that are gems. They exude Whitman's huge love of life and the awe he has for the Universe, in his Transcendental understanding of it as a sacred, united whole. I have marked the pages of these and could reproduce far too many of them. Here are a few:

"I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,

Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is signed by God's name."

"And who has made hymns fit for the earth? for I am mad with devouring ecstasy to make joyous hymns for the whole earth."

Whitman's character fills the book, and he seems to be an extremely warm person capable of the most love; this is to be taken on one hand to represent the mythical Whitman characterized in the section "Song of Myself," but is also something that reflects his own true personality. It is reminiscent of Kerouac to me, and of course Whitman influenced Kerouac. Feels like JT, too, for the same reason.

"Camerado, this is no book,
Who touches this touches a man."

However, the book is not all like this. He is stricken with the idea of the holiness of the Universe and every detail of it, and thus he ranges widely, listing world religions, different crafts, geographical features, and most of all aspects of the US as he sees it (he is in love with it, if that weren't clear). This sort of thing is all right, but there is far too much of it, and I feel it is far better suited to film or photography. The Civil War also happened about halfway through the time he was writing the book, and so the middle of the book is devoted exclusively to it. I don't know how you feel about it, but he is very patriotic and seems almost naive about it (though he did not support the Abolition movement). That may be a personal pacifist quirk of mine, however. Also, despite the love he has for nature and for the US, he often writes odes to "progess" and glorifies industrialization and the exploitation of the continent's bountiful resources - the "civilization" or "taming" of the land. This is also just a personal quirk of mine, but it did strike me as odd. There were certainly plenty of conservation-minded people around at the time he was writing.

In conclusion, I would not recommend anyone read Leaves of Grass. It is simply too long and not worth the slog. As my Dad pointed out: "Life is too short and there are too many great books to waste your time reading something you aren't enjoying." Instead, just read some Emerson or Thoreau and watch a movie that attempts the same kind of "listing" of the world's beauty - i.e., Baraka or the Qatsi trilogy. You'll get the same idea and save yourself a month or more of reading (the music's better too). If you are determined to read it, however, just find a copy of "Song of Myself."

To Burden with Beauty

2009-05-29T12:39:00.005-05:00

I hate to burden you all with more links to beautiful things, but I have decided to record all the artists I found looking through Giornale Nuovo here to keep them in one place and maybe someone will get something out of that. Because hell, there is some choice shit in here. I have been expanding the library of paintings I store on my computer with stuff I find here. Stuffing my nest?

The author is a very refined British man who lives in Sweden. He seems to be sort of a connoisseur of Renaissance/Baroque European art, especially emblem books and their artists. However, he also has very good taste in contemporary art, and shares my affinity for the surreal and fantastic in art.

Giornale Nuovo: The Flight into Egypt
Giornale Nuovo: Nobson Central
Giornale Nuovo: The Republic of Dreams
Giornale Nuovo: Carlo Maggi’s Voyage
Tetti Veneziani, di Daniele Scarpa
Giornale Nuovo: Faust in Prague
Giornale Nuovo: Laurie Lipton
Kahn & Selesnick
Giornale Nuovo: Butt Johnson
G iornale Nuovo: More Odds and End s
Giornale Nuovo: Didier Massard
Giornale Nuovo: Alberto Savini o
Giornale Nuovo: Érik Desmazières
Giornale Nuovo: A Compass Rose
G iornale Nuovo: Ghisi
Giornale Nuovo: Natura Morta
Giornale Nuovo: A Compass Rose
Giornale Nuovo: The City
Giornale Nuovo: Diptychs & Triptychs
Giornale Nuovo: Calligraphy
Giornale Nuovo: Art-Forms in Nature
Giornale Nuovo: Primo-Avrilesque

There are a lot, but they are short and beautiful pages. Enjoy!

I have also been spending a lot of time on Freerice studying famous paintings. I have learned of a number of cool painters and paintings in the process. In particular, Caspar David Friedrich caught my eye. Also Albrecht Durer, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Gustav Klimt, and J.M.W. Turner.

I realized a while ago that I am really into Romanticism, especially German Romanticism. Now, I am not at all interested in pride in my heritage or anything like that, but I always wonder about the fact that my family is German on my Dad's side, and that I have such an affinity for German art (Mahler and Hesse most notably). What does everyone think of "one's heritage?"

A Horse Breeder's Dream

2009-05-26T12:48:00.002-05:00

I had a dream last night that I was a breeding horse. Four other guys and I were being given our instructions by the guy in charge. We had expected that only three of the five were going to be assigned to fuck, but the guy in charge told us there had been a change in plans and we were all going to fuck. We ran across the field towards the mares and by the time we got there we were horses. The dream dribbled off soon after.

I think this blog has died and would like to resuscitate it. For that end, I am going to try to make you all contribute some writing sort of thing or other. I don't know if there need to be more details, but ideally, I would like a piece of short fiction (or poetry, or autobiography, etc) from everyone I can convince to do one, and for everyone to share an artist, friend, piece of music, photograph, etc, similar to what we have done before and as is our custom, but I would like to get us to put some more work into things and give more background information, as well as more personal writing as to why you appreciate the work, etc, the sort of thing that ideally might help others see what you see in it. Now, one or the other of the two preceding is probably the most I can get out of any of you. But ideally, one of each. What does everyone think of trying to get it done before July? If I don't put a deadline, there's no point, right?

Assuming no one checks here anymore, I may have to contact you all individually. I ought to do that anyway, though.

Love,
Adam

Remedios Varo

2009-05-21T20:51:00.005-05:00

I am pretty sure I made mention of this discovery in a previous blog, but apparently at least Sylvie had forgotten, which means that the rest of you almost certainly had (does anyone still read this blog? Comment!) Anyway, to review (or merely view, as the case maybe), I went to the only substantial bookstore within a few hours' drive, and spent my time looking at the coffeetable books, as is my custom. And happily, stumbled (metaphorically) into a book of Remedios Varo, whom I had never heard of before. I sort of fell in love on the spot and wrote the name down in my little notebook. But the internet is frustrating sometimes, and demands patience. I didn't find ANY decent sized scans of her work online when I looked for it at that point. But I got reminded of her today because we are studying surrealism in art class (the teacher seems to hate surrealism and doesn't get it. So her classes on it are worse than the rest of the classes, which are bullshit.) and went looking for pictures to share with the class. Now, I keep an extensive archive of Dali and Beksinski paintings on my computer (two of my other favorite painters) along with a little Magritte and Jeff Jordan. All surrealists, of course. But Varo I had none of and so I decided to go look again.

I found this man, who found himself in the same conundrum and bought a book, then scanned it for the rest of us. I imagine the rest of the site is also cool, and have some vague plans to waste a lot of time looking through it.

http://www.spamula.net/blog/2005/11/personages_1.html

http://www.spamula.net/blog/2006/01/varo_1.html

PS - I recommend downloading the pictures and viewing them fullscreen. This is optional, however. (The rest is obligatory by implication). For the ignorant, this is done by clicking on each picture individually and right-clicking and "save to" each of them.

PPS - The author of the linked blog is an owner of the Codex Seraphinianus (as well as Luigi Seraphini's other book, which I hadn't heard of before.)

Love,
Adam

Javier, Professional Fox: An Oral Portrait

2009-05-19T14:38:00.004-05:00

Javier was a professional fox. You could see this by the fact that he always wore a business suit and carried a briefcase full of memoranda. He also carried himself in a business-like manner, which helped to communicate to the less Busy that he had a lot of Important Fox Business to attend to. On Bring-Your-Cubs-to-Work Day, he could be seen carrying several scruffy fox cubs by the hair behind their necks on his way to work. Some days he wore a belt. Other days he didn't.

Javier worked in an office building. Which office building was the highest building in its immediately surroundings. Javier had gotten a position in this office building due to his schooling, which had been prestigious. He had had to move far away from his original den to take the job, and the transition had been difficult for his cubs. The office building was in an arctic climate, and in Javier's new fox city there was a high suicide rate in teenagers. Javier sometimes worried about his cubs.

His mate was a beautiful fox; there were other foxes that were perhaps more beautiful than she was, but Javier didn't think so. At least, not most of the time. Most of the other foxes thought they were a good couple and were glad to have them as members of their community. Javier's mate liked plenty of hobbies and spent a lot of money on them. Sometimes Javier got upset about this, but he never got angry at his mate and he always calmed down when he remembered that he made a lot of money as a professional fox.

One of her hobbies was to help other foxes. She did this a lot and was lauded for it. There was some poverty in the city where Javier's family lived, and she wanted to get rid of it. To do this, she worked to plan projects that helped educate poor foxes and provide them with basic fox needs. She had studied to be a dentist and worked for free providing dental treatment to poor foxes. Sometimes her older cubs came along with her, and she had them go around the poor neighborhoods with a book cart. They gave away books too.

There was once Javier's eldest cub driving the book cart through a poor neighborhood. It had gotten dark and the foxes that lived in the neighborhood had come home from their jobs and started drinking. They became intoxicated and Javier's cub sought shelter from them in a house of some of his fox friends, because drunk, hungry foxes have been known to hunt and eat other foxes, especially cubs. This is a sad fact about fox poverty. Most facts about fox poverty are sad.

Javier enjoyed going boating and working in his free time. He owned a big boat. Sometimes his neighbors felt jealous. They stopped feeling jealous when they remember that they were also professional foxes and earned a lot of money, and could buy a big boat if they wanted to. They just didn't want to, because foxes are afraid of the water.

Javier's eldest cub was a Primitivist. He was angry that foxes had exterminated humans and viewed the days when foxes lived by stealing chickens from human chicken coops as a romantic golden age. Not many foxes thought this but many of them felt it sometimes. Especially when they read books.

Foxes don't have thumbs. How did Javier tie his tie?

Women Like You

2009-05-14T22:31:00.001-05:00

Women Like you

They do not stir
these ladies of the mountain
do not give us
the twitch of eyelids

The king is dead

They answer no one
take the hard
rock as lover.
Women like you
make men pour out their hearts

'Seeing you I want
no other life'

'The golden skins have
caught my mind'

who came here
out of the bleached land
climbed this fortress
to adore the rock
and with the solitude of the air
behind them
carved an alphabet
whose motive was perfect desire

wanting these portraits of women
to speak
and caress

Hundreds of small verses
by different hands became one
habit of the unrequited

Seeing you
I want no other life
and turn around
to the sky
and everywhere below
jungle, waves of heat
secular love

Holding the new flowers
a circle of
first finger and thumb
which is a window

to your breast

pleasure of the skin
earring earring
curl
of the belly
and then
stone mermaid
stone heart
dry as a flower
on rock
you long eyed women

the golden
drunk swan breasts
lips
the long long eyes

we stand against the sky
I bring you

a flute
from the throat
of a loon

so talk to me
of the used heart

--Michael Ondaatje

Colson Whitehead

2009-05-02T15:16:00.002-05:00

My literary obsessions of 2009 have progressed as such:

1. Michael Ondaatje
2. Marilynne Robinson

and now I think I can add a third:

3. Colson Whitehead

I picked up his novel "John Henry Days" because he's been getting a ton of press for his new novel "Sag Harbor" that just came out a few days ago. Though I really want to read it, I can't afford the Canadian price of $27 (one thing I hate about Canada--the ridiculous markup of book prices. It's $15 in the USA and the exchange rate is about 80 cents to the dollar. Dumb.) so I went to the library and got his books "John Henry Days" and "The Intuitionist". I haven't gotten to "The Intuitionist" yet, but "John Henry Days" is FANTASTIC. The whole thing revolves around a festival in West Virginia (a perennially neglected state) about the folk hero John Henry. The book is about race and about technology and a critique of the media and also really interesting and well written. I am tired of cliched images and phrases that people unconsciously use, so I have been specifically searching lately for authors who are aware of their language. The originality of Michael Ondaatje's word and image choice is one of the main reasons I love him. Colson Whitehead fits the bill, too. He even references it at one point in "John Henry Days":

"When he first started in this business and was coming to understand his facility for making people believe things and was much taken with the language of his therapist, Lucien thought he was tapping into the collective unconscious. But now he thinks it's simply the atmosphere. That air is an admixture of nitrogen, oxygen, trace gasses, and one of these trace gasses is American cliché and we breathe it in with our first breath."

I also read an interview with Colson Whitehead from Powell's Books where he says this about what experiences he is thankful for as a writer:

CW: Being at The Voice, writing for different editors - there's a book editor and a music editor and so on - they all have things they like and don't like. You become aware that you do have readers with particular tastes. And they call you on your weaknesses, like, "Never use the word infectious in a music review." You become acutely aware of words you overuse, that kind of thing. The Voice, back in the day, was very hands-on editing. The editor would go through it, then you'd go through it together, so you see your mistakes in bold type. You become aware.

Overused words are a pathological obsession of mine, and it seems his as well. He also has the same obsession with local mythologies and the significance of the line between where folklore is important because parts of it were true and when it is important just because it's folklore. He also brings to the table something I haven't read much of before: the perspective of the upper-class American black experience, which to my knowledge is pretty neglected and much different from what I would have thought. I won't elaborate because I don't really understand it, but all of his books seem to deal with it in one way or another. I highly encourage everyone to read them.

For your enjoyment, here is a video from his publisher's youtube account promoting Sag Harbor. I think this will satisfactorily prove that he is A) not your typical Pullitzer Prize shortlisted author, B) hilarious and C) an interesting human being. I swear his writing is more coherent than his speech.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aILSfknGqFY

Soul Music

2009-04-30T00:37:00.002-05:00

Now I have never listened to soul music, or really jazz music, or anything like that as I ought to have and ought to now. But a nice man whom I met playing a video game online has pointed me several times into the direction of Sam Cooke, and I think I am in loving him/it.

Everyone Listens:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APl6K7k7EDc&feature=related

Crap oh well. Forgot the other links and can't seem to find em.

Only songs I've listened to have been A Change is Gonna Come and When I Fall In Love. And I love them, I've listened to A Change is Gonna Come like a hundred times now. Is it okay to enjoy soul music? I'm downloading a compilation as I speaktype.

Arnolfini Portrait

2009-04-18T16:46:00.003-05:00

I found this picture in our art class textbook. It really caught my attention, especially the man, his clothes and particularly his face. There is a sort of ghostly wisp quality about him.

The painting is apparently quite famous, and the wikipedia article on it is excessively long and detailed. I guess it is extremely well-done, and ahead of its time in its realistic qualities.

Just decided to jump on Alex's idea of sharing a little art thingus.

What a Wonderful World

2009-04-18T02:27:00.001-05:00

What a Wonderful World - Louis Armstrong

This may be my favorite song. Must've heard it a million times in covers and remixes, but he is the dreamiest!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQk2LtK680w

Weeding day

2009-04-13T13:19:00.004-05:00

You feel the sun-hot soil underfoot, breaking clumps and clods with your toes. Today is the day that the garden gets weeded, you tell yourself. Tomorrow your grandchildren are coming; their chaos helps you to live. The children you raised from babes are now raising their own, but you don’t like to think about that. Not when almost everyone you have ever loved has died. Better to embrace the labor of today, a gentle loss of yourself expressed through the menial tasks that make up a life.

As you step from bare earth to crabgrass the phone rings deep within your house; your home that had been built by your father and last painted by your now dead son. Lucky that you noticed the phone on this day, you know that as your years grew your connection to the present has wavered. The day before you were told by your youngest that she had been calling all day to remind you of her visit, you never told her that the whole of the day you had been baking not ten yards from the phone. It’s not that you can’t hear the nasty thing’s shrill ring; it’s that you have learned to ignore the messenger of death.

The day that your first child died you had been some twenty years younger; twenty years lighter. Back then you still had a desire to fix the worn floor boards that betrayed your presence to an empty house. Laundry day as you bleached the whites and attempted to scrub the bloodstains from your favorite slacks; necessary blood that flowed from the necks of dancing chickens. As the bleach burned at your callused hands the west wind blew your unmentionables out off the line and across the yard. As you leave the quiet shelter of the patio a glance west reveals a line of black, damnable black; it always rains on laundry day.

The house of your father turns to a ghostly abode as the empty space turn white with linens. The storm blocks out the spring sun, a contrast to the ethereal space within; something you would only realize on your ride to town. Your John had called; the storm had nulled any hopes of finishing out the work-day, so he wanted to take his lunch at home with his wife. As you and he raced home, the rain and wind started. The house was eerie as a yellowish-green light passed through clean sheets. It was only then that he told you to get to the cellar.

It was two days before the phone rang again; the message had been delayed by the storm, but the blow it struck still made you think of black skies and white sheets. Your first child, your Shane, had been working in his barn when the storm struck; old barnwood isn’t as strong as they say after all. You arranged the funeral for Shane; a funeral for a piece of yourself.

That was nearly two decades ago, twenty years of life and twenty years of death. Now when the phone rings and your only granddaughter dies, no funeral is held in your heart; there is nothing left to bury. Instead you unplug your phone, and walk back to the place that you planted all the pieces of your heart. Before you can finish weeding your garden the west wind reminds you that it always rains on weeding day.

Paul Klee Communicates a Feeling In a Bookstore

2009-04-04T17:54:00.006-06:00

This is a Paul Klee painting I found in my trip to the bookstore yesterday. I always spend most of my time at the bookstore looking at the art and travel picture books, the big coffee table books, because they are really expensive, and because there are no chairs there to sit down and read a normal book (which is rather annoying, isn't it?). I ended up buying myself two books which were much more expensive than I thought they would be and I probably shouldn't have bought them:

Ficciones

Cuentos Breves y Extraordinarios

The first is just Borges stories, the classic essential book of them, in Spanish. The second is a collection of extremely short story bits he and his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares edited, things that are sometimes on a few sentences long. I have already gotten about two thirds of the way through it. I may retranslate and post some of them up here sometime.

I have the greatest craving for some Hermann Hesse short stories and fairy tales right now, and I wish my computer would arrive already.

To sort of make this post semi-worthwhile, I have had a thought that I don't remember being a thought I had heard of anyone else having. That is, that Time properly ought to be divided into two distinct things: following Locke, the "primary quality" of time as objective quality of the Universe itself, and the "secondary quality" of time as something intuitively and subjectively felt. This comes from a long standing obsession of mine with the bizarreness of the subjective passing of time, and a Borges essay I recently discovered on the subject, A New Refutation of Time.

That is not the entire essay (he actually wrote it twice, hoping to get closer to being able to communicate his feeling), but it gets the point across. (Incidentally, this is where that Bernard Shaw quote came from.)

I feel like Borges is trying to get across exactly the same feeling that I have always had about time, but that in this, unlike in practically anything else he wrote, he failed, and it actually surprises me that he tried to write it at all. Also, one of his biggest examples seems to be quite obviously false to me:

"I suspect, nonetheless, that the number of circumstantial variants is not infinite: we can postulate, in the mind of an individual (or of two individuals who do not know each other but in whom the same process is operative), two identical moments. Once this identity is postulated, we may ask: Are not these identical moments the same moment? Is not one single repeated terminal point enough to disrupt and confound the series in time [(or) the history of the world, to reveal that there is no such history]?"

It seems to me that the opposite is true, that there can never be two identical moments no matter how many of the more important details are the same.

It should also be noted that Borges from the start admits that he doesn't actually believe the conclusions he arrives at in the essay.

A number of varied and related ideas have also come into my head lately, which I attribute to Borges as well. The idea of the Universe, proceeding from its conceptual beginning to end, as an entirely objective entity (which of course Berkely would jump to deny), is one of the things that led to my idea. Borges also mentioned the other idea I mentioned before, that you determine the entire course of your life before you are born. Something that seems like an original idea is that the Universe was created as an objective entity by God, and then, in the same way a director views his finished product after filming, set out to live the life of every aware living being inside Its creation.

So have I gotten stupider lately, or more self-indulgent, or have I just been doing more navel-gazing about impractical and silly mystic philosophies?

Love,

Adam

Donating

2009-03-30T16:08:00.002-06:00

I have started a thing: I have donated at least $10 from each paycheck for a month now, and plan to for as long as I am working at BBY (what about longer?), to various things. First I gave $10 to www.commondreams.org, which asks for $50,000 every season, which is a lot of cashies, but they're a huge outlet for alternative press around the world. so I figured. At this moment I am deciding to whom I'll give $10 or $15. I'm trying to get to more local/grassroots organizations, as well as aid groups working abroad as well.

I figure: I spend money on stupid shit, at least this helps something? I haven't put a huge amount of thought into it but I conclude at least spending $10 meagerly helping some do-gooder organization is better than spending that same $10 on toys or junk candy.

Does this make me a good person, indirectly?

Anyone else donate?

Also, Adam, and anyone everyone, there's this album: Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix by Phoenix, that often sounds exactly like dancier newer Of Montreal, and I am loving to it.

Also, Adam and anyone everyone, where have you been?

Some things

2009-03-17T17:20:00.002-06:00

First, I found this to be a provocative quote (though I cant at all remember where I read it. . . ).

"What you yourself can suffer is the utmost that can be suffered on earth. If you starve to death, you experience all the starvation that ever has been or ever can be. If ten thousand other women starve to death with you, their suffering is not increased by a single pang: their share in your fate does not make you ten thousand times as hungry, nor prolong your suffering ten thousand times. Therefore do not be oppressed by "the frightful sum of human suffering"; there is no sum....Poverty and pain are not cumulative."

Thoughts?

Another really interesting thing I read in Borges, which is the idea that you set out everything that will happen to you in your life before you are born. This contrasts slightly but importantly with the more common philosophy that every that happens to you in your life is set out by GOD (or any other entity or mystery that fulfills a similar role) before you are born. There are consequences of this that I could set out for you, but you will think of them and more interesting ones for yourself and then we will have a discussion about it. Please?

My parents ordered me a new computer and it may be here at sometime in the future several weeks. Hopefully within a month, for sure.

I am reading Le Morte de Arthur right now. It is kind of boring, and rather bizarre. The characters practically dont exist (as characters), and events happen in a really intensely quick sequence of semi-non-sequiters. It is alright, though. It makes me miss T.H. White's loose interpretation of it, though. I lent that book to a boy from Iceland, though. I have about 15 books left right now. When I get home, I will post a list of everything I read this year, because they have all been excessively good books.

Love,
Adam

Home Improvement

2009-03-17T01:08:00.001-06:00

We created Home Improvement, and it's spoof:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aTc0EW3khM&feature=channel_page

Hope enjoyed!

Tour from Space

2009-03-16T01:06:00.000-06:00

Everyone will watch this four part tour of the international space station. Right now I can't say it's really relevant, but it is really interesting and inspiring.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgBgmw-2U8c

Do it.

Hello Friends

2009-03-02T14:22:00.002-06:00

Hello everyone,

I suppose I may owe an explanation of the fact that I have been only spottily connected to the internet for a very long time, and why I will possibly be in an even worse situation from now on. I am in an internet cafe now, because, though the house has internet, we no longer have any working computer. My computer died suddenly and tragically, in some sort of old age related incident. To all appearances, it simply forgot its mouse and keyboard drivers, rendering it useless. I am currently debating whether to revive it, buy another, or wait until I get home without a computer. Any advice would be accepted gladly.

I am happy here, with a new host family, not doing much but enjoying what I do. I have a new host brother, 19 years old, and that is very nice. I do read a lot, and I will possibly endeavor to write reviews of them at this internet cafe if there is interest.

I am sorry I haven't talked to you in such a long time, Sylvie. I would appreciate an email, if you write one.

Aristotle Tackles History

2009-02-25T22:46:00.001-06:00

Excerpt from Aristotle's "The Poetics":

The difference between the historian and the poet is not the difference between writing in verse or prose; the work of Herodotus could be put into verse, and it would be just as much a history in verse as it is in prose. The difference is that the one tells what has happened and the other the kind of things that would happen. It follows therefore that poetry is more philosophical and of higher value than history; for poetry unifies more, whereas history aggregates.

Opinions?

How is everyone/introductions

2009-02-16T02:53:00.003-06:00

Hello, everybody - how is everybody doing? Adam how are you?And the rest of you guys, are things well?

For those who have posted but I don't know, I'm Alex and it's wonderful to meet any of you.

Anddddd while I am at it:

Adam, and everyone else, but especially Adam, maybe Shane? Trey discovered this poppy shoegaze outfit called Asobi Seksu, and I have fallen in love with their latest album, Hush. Have also heard good things about their previous album Citrus (I think?). Please check them out, because I love it? Trey Erik and I (maybe more?) will be seeing them in Pontiac in a couple weeks.

http://www.asobiseksu.com/

All-Purpose Dressing

2009-02-14T22:16:00.002-06:00

This is one of those orally-passed-down-from-my-parents recipes.
It is primarily a salad dressing, but I tend to eat it on anything.
Recently, I have eaten it on pasta, bread and pizza.
This is a kind of vague recipe because my dad was kind of vague when he told it to me, but I think you really can't mess it up.

1 clove of garlic
pinch of sea salt (the kind with the big grains)
maybe 4 tbsp olive oil?
about 2 tbsp balsalmic vinegar (but if you're as addicted to balsalmic as I am, you will want 3 or 4 tbsp)

in a bowl, crush garlic and sea salt together with a fork
add olive oil and vinegar and whisk them
eat.

This is really good. I have been meaning to post it for a long time.
Enjoy.

2009-02-08T13:06:00.003-06:00

little dumb bits I write to my best friend in my diary, of course:

The lake still cracks, Morgan.
Whatever rooms still fog.
That's as far as my car goes
in wet weather; that's
the last rut in the torn out road.

I spilt the oil on the white page.
I yolked the dirty water with thin ice.
We couldn't contain ourselves on
the bridge over the city. We have
nitrogen in cans and time release
capsules, and the legacies of
other death wishes, the other
legs of other frenzies
where we can stand.

I'm tired of the branch outside the window
where it hedges against its brethren, its same kin.
I can't stand smoothness through glass.
Let's be honest. It's the right size to grip,
and smoother than a wrist--I mean
it tapers better into itself.

We pretend we have our reasons: the part
where I ride in the backseat of the car
with my eyes closed. The cold seats,
the other people's warm legs through
blue jeans, and the dull dip of yellow
lights against my shut lids as we
cruise the asymmetries, the bought
escape routes.

I pretend to love the lateness of the night
before it surprises me. I pretend the
twice-flickering street lamps are allowances
of fate, and that I could have a place
in a place I haven't claimed. I imagine.
Imagine! And eventually I always
come back here, Morgan, to this perch,
to this pamphlet Niagara-- barrel and
rubber boots and a false
sense of distance.

"You are tired of my metaphors." It was
dark before the snow melted, and afterwards
the ice formed a stomped and disintegrating
sheet on the ground.
Who knows? Sometimes the winter is
only okay as it settles your memories
of past winters; and sometimes you
can't contain the arching: my
back, my arms, my throat.
I am trying to say I'm leaving in
so many words. I am also allowing
that I may not go.

(I will write you letters about wood
grain, bulk, the level and the valleys
where I plan to rebuke the shortened
ground, other fantasies.
Because I dream in dumb mirrors of
the self quartered by its own
earnest paring knife.
Take me to your house! I want
to see one house without white
shelves and young bolts. I
want to see your kitchen table
through the convex lense of
empty jars--)

after living a dream...

2009-02-06T07:06:00.002-06:00

How do you learn to live after you have lived a dream? It is quite the dilemma.I suppose I should begin by introducing myself, I am friend of Adam’s we met in Tuxtepec in Oaxaca, Mexico and spent many nights chatting during our Ruta Maya trip to the south of Mexico. I have recently had to return home to Australia. For me it is harder to come home than it was to leave; everyday I think about my friends and family that I left behind. It is astonishing really that they can become such a fundamental part of you within one year. I learnt so much from them and I love them unconditionally, exchange students and Mexicans alike.
I have to apologise though if this does seem a little random... but such is my life at present... and i thought perhaps this is an appropriate introduction..
For almost an entire year leading up to the exchange I thought about and certainly in those last five or six months when I knew I would be going to Mexico. Before that year I had hardly ever considered going anywhere but Europe, I wanted to go to France, but talking to people somehow made me change my preferences on that final country selection sheet and I am so glad that it did... My point is, you think about it, dream about it, talk about it for so long and when you arrive you almost don’t want to get off the plane you are so nervous and unsure. And then it begins, this dream; it is harder than you thought it would be, but so much more rewarding and beautiful too. (I am actually tearing up while listening to you raise me up in Spanish (por ti sere) right now, how sad hahaha) There are actually these moments that you have after a while and everything is settled down and you are staying with people you actually like and have local friends and you wake up and you just think “I am doing it!” and it is wonderful and all seems perfect and at peace and life is good. However when you come home you have to deal with leaving you find that it is even sadder than when you left your old life because you don’t know when you will be able to return, who will keep in contact? Two years? Three years? Twenty five years? When will I return? I am hoping for November, but it is impossible to say and only for a few weeks at a time, it is just not the same. Not to mention the fact that you have to deal with the fact that no one really cares about all of these amazing experiences that you have had, for you it was a live changing experience but I suppose that it is just not all that important for anyone else. The problem that now faces me is that now that I have lived my dream, it is so hard to move on... there are so many wonderful journeys on which I am about to embark, university, travelling, etc... but all I can think about is what I had to leave behind. It is strange, even if you are completely aware of how long you have with something before it ends, whatever it happens to be... from finishing school to exchange to a holiday to a job to a relationship, somehow if you really care about it, it never makes it any easier to let go of.

Feminism and Anais Nin

2009-02-03T21:06:00.003-06:00

Some excerpts from the Diary of Anais Nin about women/feminism, and then a discussion a little later:

“Talking with Henry I experience the sensation that there will come a time when we will both understand everything, because our masculine and feminine minds are trying to meet, not to fight each other. June could only be perceived by way of madness. The territory of woman is that which lies untouched by the direct desire of man. Man attacks the vital center. Woman fills out the circumference.”

“We know very little about woman. In the first place, it was man who invented ‘the soul.’ Man was the philosopher and the psychologist, the historian and the biographer. Woman could only accept man’s classifications and interpretations. The women who played important roles thought like men and wrote like men.”

“It was through psychology that we discovered that man’s illusion about his objectivity was a fiction, a fiction he needed to believe in. The most objective systems of thought can be exposed as having a subjective base. Now, the way a woman feels is closer to three forms of life: the child, the artist, the primitive. They act by their instant vision, feeling and instinct. They remained in touch with that mysterious region we are now opening up. They were inarticulate except in terms of symbols, through dreams and myths.”

“Man must fear the effort woman is making to create herself, not to be borne of Adam’s rib. It revives his old fears of her power. What he forgets is that dependency does not create love and to control nature is not a greater achievement than to control woman, for there will always be the revolts of instinct, the earthquakes and the tidal waves. With control one also killed the rich natural resources of both nature and woman. It was woman who reacted against the great dehumanization of man by industry, the machine. Man reacted by mutiny or crime. Woman sought other ways. Mutiny is not in her nature.”

“Man is always trying to create a woman who will fill his needs, and that makes her untrue to herself. Many of my ‘roles’ come out of this desire to fulfill man’s needs.”

"When the neurotic woman gets cured, she becomes a woman. When the neurotic man gets cured, he becomes an artist."

I was sort of bewildered by some of the parts of these quotes, so I sent it to my friend who is known for being a feminist and uber smart. She said some things that were incredible that I would like to quote for you all here:

"I disagree fundamentally with binary gender constructs. I believe that while there are differences between men and women, these do not dominate our lives and effect every single aspect. At the end of the day, we are two halves to the human race. Even then, what of transgendered folk? There is a lot more than just apples and oranges. But at the same time, we can't deny that our world is very much the construct of masculine pursuits, if the tradiotional definition of the world. And that if humanity embraced typically "feminine" values, we'd be better off for it, which is what Nin gets into when she talks about "women imagining themselves"."

"The whole idea of the MAN/WOMAN dichotomy is a really Abrahamic thing, too. Many indigineous cultures have the concept of a third gender/sex, so I think trying to argue there are only two binary genders is to unconsciously accept only the view of Abrahamic religions which in itself isn't functional for a global world.
But humanity seems to be BENT on rejecting anything that might be "feminine" -- so I think if we deconstructed the whole idea of categorizing traits, there wouldn't BE a stigma to either gender "attributes". We would just be PEOPLE who act in ways, to emotions that are all a part of the human experience."

About the concept of third gender vs. abrahamic religion:

"So I'll use the Aboriginals and South Asian cultures for examples, because they're the ones I know the most about. When the Europeans came to North America, they noticed that every single tribe (the Iroquois claim they don't, but history account says otherwise) had a group of what they called "berdache" I believe. It's actually an offensive term that comes down to translating into "rentboy" or something. But basically, they were either men who dressed and took on women's traditional roles in society, or women who dressed and took on men's roles in societies (including sexual preferences, usually). They were always seen as sort of ... magical, to be blunt. That didn't save them from being killed if they did decide to go to battle, or a village was raid, but it gave them somewhat special status. And, interestingly, if say a male "Two-Spirit" (as LGBT Aboriginals call themselves today) was sleeping with another man in the clan, the other man wasn't seen to be homosexual or a Two-Spirit himself"

"And then let's look at India subcontinent.
Hinduism is a religion with many, many Gods and Goddesses and everything in between. Sexuality never had the taboo it seemed to gain in Abrahamic religions. There is the concept of the Hijra in Hinduism (with different names in Sikhism, Jainism, but same idea) who are a seperate group of people who would be identified as LGBT by us. They have a semi-divice status as "the third sex" ... the actual old Hindi word for it translates to "third nature". They're not considered fully male or fully female, but sort of ... a combination of both. Instead of how a lot of intersexed people feel the pressure to "choose" a gender. But see, that whole culture of ... "appreciation" eroded in like Punjab, which is right on the border of the Islamic region (even though Sikhism doesn't pay attention to gender either). Punjab regularly is in contact with Islam, an Abrahamic religion which teaches seperate doctrines about man and woman. And I mean, look at Christianity and the story of Adam and Eve. The whole idea that man comes first, and woman as the "other" and different. Is prominent. That idea has become popularized in India too, with the arrival of the British and their traditions, obviously. South India used to be a matriarchal, as well, as in matrinlineal name derivative, matrilocal marriage practices, etc., but that all got deconstructed when both the Aboriginals and the Indians came in contact with the Abrahamic, Judeo-Christian doctrines of "man's sphere" and "woman's sphere"."

"And I mean, all three religions (Judaism, Islam, Christianity) have instituionalized God as a "He".
Sikhism's founder, Guru Dev Ji Nanak, explicity spoke out against misogynistic and sexist practices during the 1500s. He declared God as neither Man nor Woman, but both Mother and Father of the people. Now, again, because of outside influences, almost all translations of Sikh prayers and texts refer to God as "He" in English, even though that's not right."

SO. That's huge and a lot of really interesting stuff. But discussions on either what she said or what Nin said?

Crap in the World, or Current Event/Political Book Recommendations

2009-01-26T01:17:00.004-06:00

First, and this is completely irrelevant: Adam or anyone, have you listened to Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collectives new album? It's incredible, and definitely my favorite of theirs.

Anyway:

Everyone knows about the recent Israel aggression against the people of Gaza. If you don't, read that. Another sad case of civilians getting caught up in a useless war. There are petitions everywhere and such going around, if you see one sign it? Israel claims to have "achieved its goals" (which if we look at the reality on the ground there could only have been the destruction of Palestinian infrastructure, maybe) but any day the "truce" could be broken and Israel may once again start fighting there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932009_Israel%E2%80%93Gaza_conflict

Beyond the obvious though, I want everyone to watch this Robert Fisk lecture. Was supposed to be an advertisement for his latest book of essays, The Age of the Warrior, but just trails off and repeats the talks he's always done. Which is fine, in this case it's the best of him I've ever seen, he's definitely the angriest now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfQYhU1IfbQ

It's an hour long but it's extremely informative and affecting.

Beyond that, I need to get back into political readings. Adam if you've come across anything you think I might like lemme know. Everyone else can start looking up these guys and their books, especially Shane (I think you wanted a list of recommendations back when?). A lot of these did appear in the list of books that I sent to Adam. The books I list here are merely their most commonly referenced (or the ones I have read personally and can endorse), not necessarily their best:

Noam Chomsky - The #1, talks about everything, has a million books. I'd recommend at first Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest For Global Dominance. This is not only a good introduction to the history and politics of the "American Empire" - which is usually referencing America in the world in the post WW2 period, rather than the late 19th century - but it also explains how American foreign policy has rarely been controlled by the whims of any particular administration, and rather that it is rooted deeper, in the so-far untouchable interrelationships of power and expansionist capitalism. Nothing new, maybe.

Howard Zinn - Socialist historian, wrote the infamous People's History of the United States; is awesome. The obvious choice is that book, if you haven't read it will infuriate you, with money, power, racism, schools, and much more.

Naomi Klein - Probably the best, or at least the most prolific journalist against capitalism in the US right now. No Logo is the clear choice here, though what excerpts I have read of her new book The Shock Doctrine, the Rise of Disaster Capitalism, makes it seem maybe indespensible as well. Any of her stuff will make you hate shopping at WalMart, if you don't already (I am preaching to the choir I know it).

Robert Fisk - Amazing journalist covered Western relations with and interferences in the Middle East for a good 30 or so years. I haven't actually read anything of his, because the local B&N removed all his stuff for some reason, but I very much want to read The Great War for Civilization. It is a whopping 1300 page history of Western relations with and interferences in the Middle East. Apparently it is very depressing. Like I said above, his lectures at least are amazing and depressing; he is not an optimistic person at all anymore, which can make watching his stuff slightly draining.

Robert McChesney - Professor of communications (I think?) who focuses on the ins and outs of the American propaganda system. I have read only articles and essays by him and they are very good, and people seem to point to his Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times as the starting point. I should pick it up.

Michael Klare - His thesis is basically that modern wars are fought over natural resources, or control over them or influence over those who control them. His stuff is extremely informative and his arguments appear irrefutable or at least really attractive. I have read, and I sent Adam, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, but all of his books seem to be the same, so I'd recommend his most recent then I guess.

Chalmers Johnson - Writes and talks on militant foreign policy and its consequences. That's pretty much it. He expanded the idea of "blowback", which is just the fancy term for retaliation. His stuff is a wonderful revealing of 9-11-01. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire is the one from him, and I imagine his newer stuff is similar but more up to date.

Edward Herman - Along the same lines as Robert McChesney, he writes on the US system of propaganda. His most referenced work is the book he wrote with Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. It speaks for itself, the title I mean, I think. Probably the most thorough popular study of the subject, and its where Noam Chomsky got his "propaganda model" that he references in pretty much every work after. Very historically oriented and packed with too much information.

I know there are more? This list is moronically incomplete, even as an introuction. But I am tired. Now, this stuff isn't the deepest stuff in the world and very little of it deals with any kind of theory. It is all history and current event analysis, focusing on immediate issues such as war, human rights, international relations, the corporate consolidation of news media, empire, and such. Such information'll be important if anyone wants to get off the ass and do something about something. I'm sure most people on here do more than I do know, but you know. These are good places to start, and each one will open doors to their respective subjects.

As well, if noone listened to Chomsky's talk on anarchism, do so!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5yhsFCq8wY

On that note, I don't want to make another list of books introducing libertarian socialism because I am lazy or tired, but here's a list of authors? Starting from more recent/important through supplumentary. Just at least wikipedia them or something:

Noam Chomsky
Howard Zinn
Daniel Guerin
Rudolf Rocker
Derrick Jensen
Emma Goldman
Peter Kropotkin
Michael Bakunin
Crimethinc Ex-Workers Collective
Alexander Berkman
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Paul Avrich
Albert Meltzer
Karl Marx
Henry David Thoreau

This list is even more incomplete, Adam, gimme somor!

Alain-Fournier

2009-01-23T18:21:00.003-06:00

I liked this excerpt from an article about Alain-Fournier's "Le Grand Meaulnes":

"Particular works, for example Le Grand Meaulnes , can tell you a lot about a bookshop. The bad ones won't have it, won't have heard of it, won't even be able to find it on their systems - not that the novel makes their lives easy, the title having shifted over the decades between The Lost Domain , The Wanderer and The End of Youth as well as the French original; the author's name - his pseudonym - appearing sometimes as Alain-Fournier, sometimes with his hyphen undone, and on certain internet sites, by a process of overtranslation, as Alan Baker.

Good bookshops, though, will have one copy. Usually it is just the one, thin and a little bit tired at the edges. Often the sellers won't need to replace it more than once or twice a decade - I bought a copy recently; the shop hadn't sold another in 13 years - but that's not the point: the kind of bookseller who stocks Le Grand Meaulnes doesn't really do so for good business. If you're going to run a bookshop, you had better love books, after all, and if you love books, then Le Grand Meaulnes is the kind of novel you'll want to have around.

If you talk to people about this book, you'll notice something interesting: not only have a lot of them read it, but they're still reading it. How and where they get hold of it is a mystery - possibly they are finding it on the shelves of better-read relatives (which is what I did myself). Some books succeed by word of mouth; Le Grand Meaulnes survives by even less than that, a barely audible system of Chinese whispers.But it remains a book that writers turn to; perhaps as much as any modern novel, it has a style which has echoed through the works of others. Despite the confusion of its titles and its dog-eared thinness and its faults, this is arguably one of the most influential novels of the 20th century."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/aug/16/classics.featuresreviews1

Funeral party

2009-01-19T10:53:00.006-06:00

The dead man had only one wish
His funeral must be happy with
Musicians and dancing and plenty of
Drinks and drugs to go round

But with both their hearts
And his body in pieces no one
Felt it appropriate to celebrate
His untimely demise

The priest arriving in his ethereal gown
Examined the body and announced
This body never had a soul relief
Spread and the drinking commenced

Permits were attained and
The hallucinogens were spread
Amongst the living and the dead
Joined the crowded dance floor

The dead man began to DJ playing
songs never heard by the living
The dead man danced while
The living danced in joyous awe

The neighbors ordered the police
And the church to end this abomination
But no laws were broken or sins committed
The proper permits had been filed

So when the funeral took to the streets
The neighbors, the police and the church
All joined drinks in hand and narcotics in system
Dancing to the dead man’s beat

The strange parade was soon joined by
Worrisome parents and investigative journalists
Questions were asked and answers were
Given to these the newest disciples

The dead man’s funeral began
To feed the music into the city’s P.A.
And the dance of the dead soon took
The lives of the living

The dead city had only one wish
Their funeral must be happy with
Musicians and dancing and plenty of
Drinks and drugs to go round

Cool Blog Alert

2009-01-17T16:27:00.002-06:00

http://www.contemporation.com/

If you remember Olivia, who posted the photos of the West (more posts, please, O!), this is her blog. And I think her friend Taylor's too.
It's really great.
Immediately, it led me to a cookbook that I just bought and the discovery that O and I share an obsession with Sophia Coppola and the band Phoenix.

Just wanted to share.

Dream at Old Friends

2009-01-14T01:45:00.002-06:00

I had the first "triple dream", if that is what the phenomenon is called - where you think you're awake but it turns out you were still dreaming. It happened twice, then I woke up. I think it was the first I've had. Hopefully not.

I was in bed, in a different bed, and I awoke to some noise downstairs. I lay comfortably in bed and overhear vague chatter - included are my current roommate Erik and some others I can't remember. I also hear mentions of "JT this" and "JT that", and the situation seemed to be was that he was there, talking with the other guys downstairs after having come back from where-ever-the-hell-he-is. I become excited, of course, but then I wake up, I think. It is silent now, but it doesn't feel like I woke up, exactly. I look around, there is pale yellow sunlight around the room and dust floating in the air near me. I am disappointed that I was apparently in a dream and that JT wasn't really home. Then, as I am getting out of bed and collecting myself, JT bursts into the room, jabbering about something. I am hit with relief and excitement for a moment, and we start chatting about some nonsense.

Then I actually woke up. It was very, very bizarre.

I don't care much for the analysis of dreams, so I don't really think there was any meaningful symbolism I should pay attention to, but it at least reminded me of the unfortunate mess that was his leaving and our mutual falling apart. Woe the days.

Cats

2009-01-12T11:16:00.003-06:00

The dream begins with Chantal and I riding my Dad's motorcycle, strangely I was driving and yet had no inclination as to where we were heading. Despite my confusion I was comforted by the balance between the sun's warmth and the wind's briskness. Before I fully accepted that I was driving a motorcycle we pulled into an ice cream shop in Caseville. Realizing how convenient it was, since ice cream was exactly what I had been craving, I deduced that the motorcycle must be magical.

Dream Break

Chantal, Logan (a character from the t.v. series Gilmore Girls) and I were rather enthusiastically enjoying various desserts; I happened to have a rather delicious lemon ice. When Logan's sister and her usual entourage pulled up in an extraordinarily nice car, got out, walked passed us and began ordering. For some reason this infuriated Logan who began to glare furiously at his unyielding metal spoon, Chantal and I however turned and began to call out to her. However, much to our dismay, she and her goons just walked passed us and got in the car. Chantal asked Logan what her problem was and he furiously stated that she was just playing one of 'her games.'
At which point we all stood up and ran to Logan's ridiculously nice car.

A long and furious car chase ensued with all the absurdity of a high dollar movie, helicopter cam and all. We nearly crash numerous times but at the moment that we were about to roll/lose control Chantal's cat Bandit would be sitting in our path. Bandit being extraordinarily cute and extraordinarily absent minded would look at the car as if to say that it wouldn't dare ruin his day and we would slow to a stop, only to continue the chase.

The climax of the dream was a beach chase scene. In which, the beach gets narrower and narrower until it ends quite suddenly, with Logan's sister escaping in a speedboat and us flying off of a cliff. Bandit however is waiting for us at the bottom of the cliff and ends the dream by telling us that he has had quite enough our foolishness.

Recent Books

2009-01-11T19:46:00.002-06:00

A Digest of Recent Reading

In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje
Everyone should read this. It is probably one of the best books I have ever read. I won't even bother posting excerpts because it should be read as a whole.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
This is the sequel and, though not as good as the first, is worth reading.

"I see [Herodotus] more as one of those spare men of the desert who travel from oasis to oasis, trading legends as if it is the exchange of seeds, consuming everything without suspicion, piecing together a mirage. 'This history of mine,' Herodotus says, 'has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument.' What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history—how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love…"

"A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water."

"And all the names of the tribes, the nomads of faith who walked in the monotone of the desert and saw brightness and faith and colour. The way a stone or found metal box or bone can become loved and turn eternal in a prayer. Such glory of this country she enters now and becomes part of. We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if trees, fears we have hidden in as caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography—like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps."

How I Became One of the Invisible by David Rattray
Memoir. Not amazing. Rattray is best known for his translations of Antonin Artaud and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte.

"He said he liked the idea of metamorphosis because change is the law of life and permanence spiritual if not physical death, both of which are also strongly suggested by the idea of closeness with another person: 'No one can ever come close to touching another person. Heaven help them if they try.'"

"I called the hermits in my story 'girovagos' because they were wanderers (vagos) who gyrated through both mundane and mystic spheres. They were also citizens of a secret utopia."

"The day itself is like an immense golden rind sectioned again and again, until there is nothing left except for the tears in our eyes and the smell of orange peel and the sky all around, blue and unchanging, because we can look at heaven any way we like, but it’s always the same."

"From the summit, Morocco is visible on a clear day. I wanted to see Africa. It’s said to be the cradle of the human race. But my immediate ancestry is European. To approach Africa, I wanted to have at least one foot on native ground. At the same time, I realized the geographic displacement was hardly necessary, considering the whole of Africa and her prodigious history were in me, too, and, for me, not elsewhere."

"The modern person’s ability to access photo-image information has looped back so far into the deep structures of everyone living within electronic reach that memory itself refers less and less to the past than to the faculty of selectively retrieving bodies of contemporary information from a logarithmically expanding base, in a universe where each night in one or another library one more great book goes out like a dying star." (written in 1992)

“The life I accept is the most fearful argument against me.” –René Crevel

“To be liberated is to pierce the future with a destructive gaze that vanquishes omens and exposes the future as nothing but an illusion. What can be yet to come in a world that is absolutely full, where everything that has ever been still is, and where everything that will ever be, is already here? Let the fire of love devour future and past and deliver me into the jaws of a perpetual present…” –Roger Gilbert-Lecomte

Collapse

2009-01-09T21:54:00.004-06:00

Jared Diamond's Collapse is another extremely huge book. It covers so many things that the beginning seems almost completely estranged from the end, except that it is logically progressive and makes a lot of important sense. Yet for some reason the conclusion is not the marketed aspect of the book, but rather the building evidence. For you see, this is a book about how civilization is killing the world.

However, Diamond first examines several older civilizations, mostly isolated cases that are easy to use as natural experiments, and defines a framework for the ways a society can fall, and also a "roadmap" of steps a society can take on the way to solving its problems. The first half of the book is fascinating for its history and romantic for its mystery (and because he writes about isolated Pacific islands and the Norse), but the second part is really the important part; after it, the first sort of pales.

At least at the end, it is, in essence, Derrick Jensen, except with a strictly scientific scope and with a different conclusion: Diamond never implies that this problem is inextricably tied with technological civilization, although one section does give really good reasons for this point of view, which he never contradicts (I'll quote below). The first part, that is, was essentially an inversion of Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Essentially, it is just as much of a must-read as Endgame, except that it may satisfy people (ahem, Alex) who feel Jensen is too Romantic and sentimental, and that this makes his conclusion less valid or biased. Really, I suppose the conclusion must be a matter of opinion, but the truth of the matter that both of them point out is what you all need to know of, I think. Thus, take your pick; Diamond is the scientist and favors the civilization proposal in a certain sense; Jensen writes with much more feeling, his books are much more emotional, and his conclusion is that civilization is undesirable in any manifestation, ever. Please read one of them, though, preferably both.

"Technology will solve our problems." "This is an expression of faith about the future, and therefore based on a supposed track record of technology having solved more problems than it created in the recent past. Underlying this expression of faith is the implicit assumption that, from tomorrow onwards, technology will function primarily to solve existing problems and will cease to create new problems. Those with such faith also assume that they will do so quickly enough to make a big difference soon. In extended conversations that I had with two of America's most successful and best-known businessmen and financiers, both of them eloquently described to me emerging technologies and financial instruments that differ fundamentally from those of the past and that, they confidently predicted, would solve our environmental problems.
But actual experience is the opposite of this assumed track record. Some dreamed-of new technologies succeed, while others don't. Those that do succeed typically take a few decades to develop and phase in widely: think of gas heating, electric lighting, cars and airplanes, television, computers, and so on. New technologies, whether or not they succeed in solving the problems that they were designed to solve, regularly create unanticipated new problems. Technological solutions to environmental problems are routinely far more expensive than preventive measures to avoid creating the problem in the first place: for example, the billions of dollars of damages and cleanup costs associated with major oil spills, compared to the modest cost of safety measures effective at minimizing the risks of a major oil spill.
Most of all, advances in technology just increase our ability to do things, which may be either for the better or for the worse. All of our current problems are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology. The rapid advances in technology during the 20th century have been creating difficult new problems faster than they have been solving old problems: that's why we're in the situation in which we now find ourselves. What makes you think that, as of January 1, 2006, for the first time in human history, technology will miraculously stop causing new unanticipated problems while it just solves the problems that it previously produced?"

"To grasp the worldwide scale of unintentional garbage transport, consider the garbage collected on the beaches of tiny Oeno and Ducie Atolls in the Southeast Pacific Ocean: uninhabited atolls, wihtout freshwater, rarely visited even by yachts, and among the world's most remote bits of land, each over a hundred miles even from remote uninhabited Henderson Island. Surveys there detected, for each linear yard of beach, on the average one piece of garbage, which must have drifted from ships or else from Asian and American countries on the Pacific Rim thousands of miles distant. The commonest items prove to be plastic bags, buoys, glass and plastic bottles (especially Suntory whiskey bottles from Japan), rope, shoes, and light bulbs, along with oddities such as footballs, toy soldiers and airplanes, bike pedals, and screwdrivers.
A more sinister example of bad things transported from the First World to developing countries is that the highest blood levels of toxic industrial chemicals and pesticides reported for any people in the world are for Eastern Greenland's and Siberia's Inuit people, who are also among the most remote from sites of chemical manufacture or heavy use. Their blood mercury levels are nevertheless in the range associated with acute mercury poisoning, while the levels of toxic PCBs in Inuit mother's breast milk fall in a range high enough to classify the milk as "hazardous waste." Effects on the women's babies include hearing loss, altered brain development, and suppressed immune function, hence high rates of ear and respiratory infections.
Why should levels of these poisonous chemicals from remote industrial nations of the Americas and Europe be higher in the Inuit than even in urban Americans and Europeans? It's because staples of the Inuit diet are whales, seals, and seabirds that eat fish, molluscs, and shrimp, and the chemicals become concentrated at each step as they pass up this food chain. All of us in the First World who occasionally consume seafood are also ingesting these chemicals, but in smaller amounts. (However, that doesn't mean that you will be safe if you stop eating seafood, because you now can't avoid ingesting such chemicals no matter what you eat.)"
Gah!!!

Suggestions as to what an individual can do to make a difference.
Vote

Buy with a conscience and information

Increase public awareness - Get other people to do what you do, to increase its effect.

Praise good companies and good policies, instead of just damning what is bad

Learn what links in the chain are susceptible to consumer action (retailers)

Work to fix the local environment - Form groups, communicate with other local groups, and set a good example.

Donate to good organizations

Fragments of the West

2009-01-08T10:37:00.007-06:00

To the readers and writers of this blog, my name is Olivia. I was invited to join your collection of musings and add my own thoughts. Specifically, it was requested that I share some of the pictures I have taken while living in and with the west. I am originally from Ohio. During my senior year of highschool, I was enticed and smitten by On the Road by Jack Kerouac - like several others around my age before me. I was bewitched by the descriptions of the vast and open west - the dust towns, the dramatic prescence of mountains and canyons, the never ending road. The idyllic simplicity of what others might call 'nowhere'. I was seduced. I wanted to be caught at midnight in the warm desert with nothing but a backpack and my introspection.

It's true that perhaps I was more in love with the idea of the west then actual places. However, I was willing to risk it. After graduation, I left Ohio for Idaho. I was accepted into Brigham Young University in Idaho and began my own journey. I could see first hand the true allure.

Over time, I made friends from the big cities I had read about. I found that I had a weakness for boys from Colorado. I found myself at home with girls from Seattle. The opportunities for travel

were awoken.

I was invited to stay in Denver for the week of Thanksgiving and have taken pictures there and the other places I have experienced. Included are pictures of Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and the surrounding west.

A local small town saloon ...
(Rigby, Idaho)

The road to St. Anthony...
(Eastern Idaho)

Perhaps the only tree for miles ...
(Eastern Idaho)

The highway from Salt Lake City to Idaho ...
(Southern Idaho or Northern Utah)

The beginning of the Rockies ...
(Northwestern Colorado)

The end of the Rockies ...

(Near Denver)

This is the west as I see it.

Things that Happen

2009-01-04T20:45:00.002-06:00

by Eugenio Trueba

Why am I the son of Francisco and Elvira? How did they meet? It seems that both were in the same festival that she had refused to attend because her boyfriend had a cold, with a fever, and it didn't seem right to go have fun in his absence. But she gave in to the insistence of her girlfriends, and it was on that occasion that she met my father. Forgetting her former suitor, she began a relationship with Francisco Miranda and ended up marrying him. I am the fruit of that marriage and so my appearance in this world would not have occurred if not for the cold of a stranger that caused the casual encounter of my progenitors, who eventually fell in love. Who would have guessed?

But, digging a little deeper, I know that my father attended that festival - so defining in my life - because that night he was visiting the city and was supposed to take a bus to Guadalajara. He couldn't board the bus due to a labor strike on the bus line, and so, to pass the time, he went into the festival where he met Elvira Garnica, my mother. Thus, thanks to an unrelated transportation strike, I am here, still living. It's true that the sentiments of the protagonists may have had something to do with this event, but it's undeniable that I would never have been born without the cold and without the strike.

Why was my father visiting the city in which he was to become my father? I know that Francisco Miranda, then a resident of Texas, won in a raffle a trip to Mexico, with its final destination at that city where he met Elvira. Therefore, before the cold and the strike, I would not have been born without my father's good luck to have been favored with a free trip to the country.

What about where I was born? I must point out that I did not choose the location. I know, then, that my father's bosses decided to send him to Guadalajara as a representative in the sale of agricultural equipment; whence came his interest in seeing said city. Who would have guessed that from a decision of some business owners, Francisco Miranda and Elvira Garnica, already married, would have established themselves there, where I was given birth to. Everything was developing through events outside anyone's control, me least of all.

It can't be denied that only by accident am I the son of two people determined beyond my will, as I could have been son of any couple in the world. Why Francisco and Elvira? Why an unexpected festival, a cold, a strike, and a raffle? Why Guadalajara? I have grown up where I was born - without my own will having anything to do with this - and I have learned to speak Spanish - without having any choice about this either - and I have studied in various schools of diverse grades, etc. You will all have to recognize that everything could have happened another way; I could have been English or Korean, Latvian or Malayan. I could even have grown up in Uganda, Aruba or Hungary. No, Guadalajara, with no other possibility.

The friends I had, as is natural, are people who live in the same city. One of them, Ramon Esparza, I met in school. The first day of classes he appeared at my side, on the bench next to mine. It is to this involuntary encounter I owe my relationship with his sister Clotilde. She said she loved me and had decided to marry me, but at this time I lacked the resources to sustain a home, so marriage was made impossible by forces beyond my will.

After graduating, I knew I had to earn a living. My mother set out to find me a job because I refused to choose, with the certainty that the business would resolve itself without my intervention, as with everything that happened to me. It so happened that Clotilde's father died in an accident, and she and her brother inherited the factory and a regular fortune. She put her share in my hands and we were married, all due to a bad bus driver who crashed head on with the vehicle Clotilde's father was driving, causing his death, and the fact that I had met Ramon in school. All the sign were united, from the marriage of my parents, my involuntary birth and upbringing, my casual encounter with Clotilde and the death of her father.

As I learned very early that I had little or nothing to do with what happened to me, I abandoned myself more and more to the play of circumstances; in such a way that every time I had to choose one thing or another, far from choosing, I waited, trusting the action to fate. My libertas arbitri, if indeed it exists, has always been overcome by the fatum of destiny, starting with being who I am.

Clotilde was made desperate seeing that I trusted everything to chance and that I didn't move I finger to manage our home. To any problem I told her "Don't worry, the solution with come."
One of the problems was the management of the factory. The market was flooded with the same products we produced, and the ended up losing any value at all. There was nothing to do but close down, and it is clear that in this neither I nor Clotilde nor Ramon were at fault.

A severe family crisis followed and she, seeing that I abstained from any action to take care of it, left me, saying that she couldn't take any more of my lack of worrying. As it can be seen, a market phenomenon that I had nothing to do with caused the destruction of my home. If it was something already written, why beg Clotilde to stay? She will return, certainly, when something unexpected happens.

I have accepted the decline of my good luck because it is useless to fight the facts. The years that have passed since Clotilde left me have had the virtue of teaching me to endure misery. I can do nothing against it. I know that I am sick because of an unexpected germ. I know that I may die and that this too is inevitable.

Translated by Adam Kranz on January 4, 2009
Written by Eugenio Trueba, published in "Once Cuentos"

The Study of Philosophy

2009-01-04T17:42:00.002-06:00

by Eugenio Trueba

When I started to worry about the origin of everything, my teacher told me that that was the business of philosophy and there was nothing else to do for it except to study the greatest thinkers of all time. Trusting that in this manner I'd find the solution, set to work reading the philosophers.

Arduous task. I found languages much different from normal and in every one of my attempts to learn them (which I do not know when will end) I spent a lot of time untangling their unsuspected meanings, without ever being sure of the meaning I gave them; I typically change them every time through.

Generally, on the first reading, I sympathize with the author, to whom I have to give credit for contradicting a preceding author of high standing in the wide world of philosophy; but later, when I learn what another has said about the same topic, I doubt what the previous one said. I always find clear discrepancies (or at least I suspect that they exist, although of this I cannot be sufficiently certain either). It would seem that the last I study is also the final truth, and to deduce something more definitive, I return to the previous readings in order to compare, without ever being able to take sides. Then I turned to the commentaries and secondary texts hoping to obtain a better understanding. I am entering myself in diverse currents and schools of thought in which coincidences almost disappear and give way to simple differences or frank oppositions, with respect to which it is not easy to form an opinion.

I should point out that before I seriously began to search for the origin of everything, I had a few ideas, products of my ignorance, which I favored very boldly, as I had no basis for them other than my own beliefs. When I realized this, I thought my ideas might coincide with some philosopher, allowing them to become mere ignorant replications.

Not without some happiness did I find that they could have some grounds. I found some writings in which I see a suspicion of support for my old inclinations. Stupid of me. In the next pass I found arguments truly destructive of any approximation of an agreed truth, giving way to ideas as distant from mine as they were unexpected. I adhered then, violating my liberty, to the opposite point of view without knowing that further ahead, upon analyzing these new currents, insecurity would reappear even stronger.

I realized that reflecting deeply about one of the thousands of questions that arise doesn't necessarily mean to propose a solution (although every philosopher always ventures certain deductions) but that what's important is to introduce, in a more or less ordered form, profound debates that culminate in darkness or plant the seeds of doubt in what could have seemed clear and luminous.

Admitting that such deceptive reasoning couldn't be right doesn't mean that the task is futile, although on various occasions I have found myself tempted to abandon it all and return to the primitive dogmas of my ignorance. Everything depends on the form in which they are presented, in philosophic language that I have learned to dominate. But this would be a lie; the beliefs are not valid even when they are disguised scientifically.

I gathered my patience and continued, and arrived at the conclusion that there are as many discoveries as philosophers, in no less than two and a half millennia, starting with the Greeks, with no prejudice to previous cultures, to other civilizations, who also formulated terrible questions. Will the time come when I have to take sides?

Callicles said that spending too much time on philosophy can ruin a man, but as man is the animal that asks questions and I am a man, I have no recourse but to keep asking.

I should point out that I am not searching for answers for their own sake, but principly to know how to act. This has been the base of my worries and I've found many diverse and contrary responses, yet still I have no idea to which I am inclined. This perplexion is, for the moment, my state. I sometimes think that the philosophers just like to talk to compete with each other. When someone affirms something, immediately someone else goes on the defensive and starts to criticize all of it to justify a new position, and so on.

The problem is, I still don't know how to act because I don't know how to think. But as it's impossible to stop acting while I still have life, I spend my existence in uncertainty, without knowing if I'm in the right or if my life is only a chain of errors, impossible to amend.

Everyone knows that Socrates said that he only knew that he didn't know anything, understanding the great difficulty involved in establishing the final word in any problem. For me, that is only a starting place, an invitation to keep investigating, which I am doing now and will keep doing while I still have life, because being able to say "I only know that I know nothing" is indispensable to finding all that is unknown. On the contrary, how can you affirm that something is already known, when at least that isn't known.

I'm tired, but it is impossible to renounce my quest. So far I haven't encountered anything that brings me repose, and I have to keep consulting the great philosophers, although they don't agree on anything, in hope of discovering, finally, an answer to the origin of everything, even if it is my ruin.

Translated by Adam Kranz on January 4, 2009
Written by Eugenio Trueba, published in "Once Cuentos"

Heart of Darkness

2009-01-03T21:06:00.000-06:00

"It seems to me, I am trying to tell you a dream - making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that comingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams. . . "
He was silent for a while.
". . . No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence - that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone. . ."
Page 78

I read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness; it's short, only 100 pages or so, and really richly written. The book inspired Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam movie "Apocalypse Now," and I downloaded that and watched it after finishing the book this afternoon. In my opinion, the movie does everything the book does (except Conrad's delicious prose) but better; things are elaborated more, more things happen, and there is considerably more characterization. Both recommended. That passage above is one of those passages you feel is written directly for you, because I've had that revelation before.

New Short Film! and a thought.

2009-01-03T03:57:00.002-06:00

First:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgDDGadhOZs

"T Bird" - Please go and watch this. I am tremendously proud of it, and in my opinion this is the best thing we have put on film.

Secondly:

Adam I started keeping a journal. I have gone through some extremely interesting revelations that I'm sure everyone goes through when writing in a journal. Going back and actually reading what I have recorded as my thoughts in a certain emotional state is a really bizarre experience. I am glad that I've begun one, better late than never. And in writing in it, I made an interesting observation: I think my educational sloth and my restlessness go hand in hand. Not surprising, probably. It seems I have run out of the lust for learning and right now the only thing that satisfies me is actually doing something. You know what I mean? I even hate reading things like A Walk in the Woods, just because I know that those experiences are within my reach at this very moment. Science reading doesn't captivate me because I just want to buy a damned telescope or magnifying glass. I think the same goes for reading fiction and such. I think that's why I've had this irritable burst of creative output in the past few months. I don't mean I don't like it, because I do think right now it - creating - is more worthwhile than learning. What does anyone think about this? Adam, do you think you will hit this hump?

Escape from Freedom

2009-01-01T11:54:00.000-06:00

"The right to express our thoughts, however, means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own; freedom from external authority is a lasting gain only if the inner psychological conditions are such that we are able to establish our own individuality."
Page 266

"Instead of allowing the awareness of death and suffering to become one of the strongest incentives for life, the basis for human solidarity, and an experience without which joy and enthusiasm lack intensity and depth, the individual is forced to repress it."
Page 271

" . . . to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. . . . he is deeply afraid of taking the risk and the responsibility of giving himself his own aims."
Page 278

"Whether it be the fresh and spontaneous perception of a landscape, or the dawning of some truth as the result of our thinking, or a sensuous pleasure that is not stereotyped, or the welling up of love for another person - in these moments we all know what a spontaneous act is and may have some vision of what human life could be if these experiences were not such rare and uncultivated occurrences."
Page 286 - Cf. Crimethinc. - all

"Love is the foremost component of such spontaneity; not love as the dissolution of the self in another person, but love as spontaneous affirmation of others,as the union of the individual with others on the basis of the preservation of the individual self."
Page 287

"This implies that what matters is the activity as such, the process and not the result."
Page 288 - Cf. Crimethinc. - Product is the excrement of action!

"He is aware of himself as an active and creative individual and recognizes that there only one meaning of life: the act of living itself."
Page 289

"Positive freedom also implies the principle that there is no higher power than this unique individual self, that man is the center and purpose of his life; that the growth and realization of man's individuality is an end that can never be subordinated to purposes which are supposed to have greater dignity."
Page 291 - Cf. Crimethinc. - No Gods

"If by anarchy one means that the individual does not acknowledge any kind of authority, the answer is to be found in what has been said about the difference between rational and irrational authority. Rational authority - like a genuine ideal - represents the aims of growth and expansion of the individual. It is, therefore, in principle never in conflict with the individual and his real, and not his pathological, aims."
Page 296

"One condition for this is the elimination of the secret rule of those who, though few in number, wield great economic power without any responsibility to those whose fate depends on their decisions."
Page 299

". . . unless the stream of social life continuously flows from below upwards, a planned economy will lead to renewed manipulation of the people."
Page 301 - Cf. Anarcho-syndicalism

(from Dec. 28) It is around noon, and I have been awake since 9 PM last night. I will hopefully be awake until a similar hour tonight, so that I can reverse my devilish nocturnality and get some real food. In the meantime, I am trying to accomplish something. I finished Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom just now, bringing my book list total for the year to 55, providing I don't sneak any more in (there are two days until 2009, and Collapse is 500 pages long. . . ). The book is only 300 pages long, but mentally, it is huge. This is my justification as to why it took me so long, anyway. I have made a draft to save all my notes and quotes from the book, and it will be The Devil's Own Task weeding out a few quotes for this post in a minute.

Fromm thoroughly analyzes the human relationship to freedom and the history of this relationship. He determines that, if we are allowed to interact with the world spontaneously (of our own free will) and fulfill our potentials, we will have gained true positive freedom. This is the end of human progress, in his mind: a sort of anarcho-syndicalist society based on technology. However, we have not reached this point in our development yet, and so various factors are colluding to induce destructiveness and the willingness (read: eagerness) to submit to authority. These factors have arisen because of the course of certain events in recent history. To make a very long story short, the rise of capitalism and the increased freedoms of modern democracies have left the individual alone and anxious, without the safety of a feudal social order or the Church to dictate one's place in the cosmos, and the other side of things has lagged. We have not sufficiently developed the capacity to self-define, to truly become an individual, and to relate spontaneously with the world.

Obviously, I'm having a really hard time summarizing this book. It covers everything, and Fromm leaves no question unanswered. Critically, I'm still having a dilemma regarding the scientific value of his techniques. His claims seemed to be based more on that Freudian species of hypothesizing than on real evidence of any sort. However, this is not the whole of the book, and if these things entirely lack value, the book is still important and worth reading on other merits.

He takes a very clear view to human nature and the nature of society, and the dynamic and impossibly complex way they are related. His explanation of the rise of Fascism seems essentially sound even if it is a bit vague (perhaps necessarily, as he's describing psychological phenomena occurring over a broad population). Further, his ideas regarding the progress, history, and ideal end of the human search for freedom are provocative - though I have decided I disagree. He also understands and articulates the problems with modern society, the things that are causing massacres and meaninglessness and conformity.

His ideas regarding conformity are especially interesting and problematic for me, as they seem to be based on intuitive truths, things we've all experienced, and they are major obstacles to an objective viewpoint in any matter. What I'm referring to is summed up here:

"He has the illusion of having arrived at an opinion of his own, but in reality he has merely adopted an authority's opinion without being aware of this process."
Page 215

Fromm is a genius and wrote a decent number of these passages, and, towards the end, starts sounding exactly like Crimethinc.

I had a dream this afternoon.

2008-12-31T19:16:00.002-06:00

After a significant lost beginning, I believe I am . . . I can't make this make sense yet. I'll give you the three jumbled parts.

I am standing in front of a house, trying very carefully to use a pulley and rope system to send a lantern and something I believe is a 6-disk CD player up to Eileen's window. It is dark, the house is to my right, and the lantern is red. Morgan is or was there at some point. I eventually succeed and enter the house myself.

I am in a car, my car, actually, with JT and Laura and someone else, and Laura is driving. I am in the back seat on the driver's side. We are in a residential neighborhood, it is dark, and it is snowing lightly. We are doing some vaguely mischievous thing, and sort making a moderate mess. I suddenly get worried about whether or not Laura has a driver's license, in case we should be caught. We are eventually stopped somehow, by a man at the end of a cul-de-sac. He wasn't too strict, but insisted we would have to clean up the mess we had made, which we promptly began doing. However, once we began cleaning (which consisted merely of sweeping snow) the entire scene shifted. Apparently Eileen and Morgan had very highly recommended some novel to me earlier, and I was now reading it, and it was the two main characters who were now in the lamplit street, sweeping snow. The main characters are two boys in their early teens.

It turns out that the kind man did not just ask us to clean up; he had also alerted another man, some sort of leader or guardsman or something was the impression I (I was identifying mostly with one of the boys) got. My companion finished his work first and was taken to this man's house. When I arrive, I am greeted by a rich old gentleman in a red robe and with a beard and such, and his wife, a kind but harsh-featured woman. Their house is similarly richly furnished. They begin speaking to me, something about the American Civil War. Apparently this gentleman is some sort of revisionist historian or an old Southern Gentleman or something. He offers some radical new perspective on the war, anyway.

We then go to check on my companion, who is now wearing an all white dress suit. He is in the corner of some sort of room, that kind of room rich people have that seem to have no evident purpose, near a fireplace, scratching religious symbols into the stone wall. He looks deranged, and upon seeing us enter, begins shouting, something about if they are revising the history of the Civil War, they should also be revising their impression of Christianity itself. He looks vile, he is spitting his words, and then begins convulsing. He collapses against the mantel and vomits into the fireplace.

The old gentleman becomes furious upon hearing my companion speak that way, and I become afraid for him and myself. He calls these robot servants he has to take my companion and I and, I presume, do bad things to us. I pick up my unconscious companion and flee with him. No one pursues. I hide in the stall of a bathroom around the corner and wait. A robot arrives presently, dressed similarly to the gentleman, in red robes and with a very aggressive, yet emotionless demeanor. The robot seems to be blind. It opens the door to the bathroom, and begins with the far stall. To check if we are inside, it raises a knife and swiftly cuts the lock, though in the first, then the second, the doors are not closed. When he comes to the third, where I am, I quickly jump over to the second, he checks, and decides we are not in the bathroom.

2008-12-31T06:23:00.003-06:00

A collection of the most interesting links I have found from idlethink.

A place to find the cheapest source for any given book.
BooksPrice - Book Price Comparison - Compare Book & Textbook Prices

iPod Download. Poetry: Forgetfulness - Billy Collins Animated Poem

A list compiled by some anthropologists of things found universally in every human society.
Human Universals

A Jared Diamond essay regarding the hypothesis that the adoption of agriculture was the greatest mistake in the history of mankind.
mistake_jared_diamond.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Big pile of Donald Barthelme stories. They are absolutely wonderful; I can't pick favorites.
jessamyn.com : Donald Barthelme's barthelmismo

Anselm's proofs of God adapted to Santa Claus.
THE FIVE WAYS OF PROVING SANTA CLAUS

Earth From Above comes to NYC - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Scenes from Antarctica - The Big Picture - Boston.com

George Bernard Shaw short story.
The Black Girl in Search of God - Wikilivres

Seagull Dream

2008-12-31T00:14:00.002-06:00

I am a boy but also a seagull. It is morning, and I am flying by the coast. I see an old woman with long hair on the shoreline. She is pulling out her hair strand by strand and throwing it into the wind, which carries it out into the ocean. I watch her--she's doing it very slowly, watching each strand fly and then sink into the waves before she plucks another one. I fly farther out to sea. It quickly becomes dusk and I am famished. I look at the water trying to find a fish to eat, and I see something silvery being pulled in the waves. I swoop down, and it is the woman's hair being rolled messily into a net by the waves. Three fish are caught in it, and I eat.

Poetry Binge

2008-12-29T22:10:00.005-06:00

_Souls And Rain-Drops
Light rain-drops fall and wrinkle the sea,
Then vanish, and die utterly.
One would not know that rain-drops fell
If the round sea-wrinkles did not tell.

So souls come down and wrinkle life
And vanish in the flesh-sea strife.
One might not know that souls had place
Were't not for the wrinkles in life's face.
-- Sidney Lanier--

_The Music Crept By Us
I would like to remind
the management
that the drinks are watered
and the hat-check girl
has syphilis
and the band is composed
of former SS monsters
However since it is
New Year's Eve
and I have lip cancer
I will place my
paper hat on my
concussion and dance.
-- Leonard Cohen--

_The Dalliance of the Eagles
Skirting the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)
Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
The rushing amorous contact high in space together,
The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling
Till o'er the river pois'd, the twain yet one, a moment's lull,
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,
Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse flight,
She hers, he his, pursuing.
-- Walt Whitman--

_The Divine Image
Cruelty has a Human Heart,
And Jealousy a Human Face;
Terror the Human Form Divine,
And Secrecy the Human Dress.

The Human Dress is forged Iron,
The Human Form a fiery Forge,
The Human Face a Furnace seal'd,
The Human Heart is hungry Gorge.
-- William Blake--

I have been drinking words today from a website I found a while ago. In the morning I know I will regret it. Words of beauty, sadness, love and death floating in my dreams will awaken my memories of memory's past. When finally I wake these thoughts will leave me in awe of my own poetic impotence.

The website: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/index.html

Balance

2008-12-29T12:47:00.002-06:00

This is a sort of long and irrelevant post so I will save space and post it as a comment.

The Book of Merlyn

2008-12-28T04:08:00.000-06:00

"Even the Greek definition anthropos, He Who Looks Up, is inaccurate. Man seldom looks up above his own height after adolescence."
Page 53

"He knew suddenly that nobody, living upon the remotest, most barren crag in the ocean, could complain of a dull landscape so long as he would lift his eyes. In the sky there was a new landscape every minute, in every pool of the sea rocks, a new world. He wanted time off, to live."
Page 99

"There is nothing so wonderful as to be out on a spring night in the country; but really in the latest part of night, and, best of all, if you can be alone. Then, when you can hear the wild world scamper, and the cows chewing just before you tumble over them, and the leaves living secretly, and the nibblings and grass pluckings and the blood's tide in your own veins; when you can see the loom of the trees and hills in deeper darkness and the stars twirling in their oiled grooves for yourself; when there is one light in one cottage far away, marking a sickness or an early riser upon a mysterious errand; when the horse hoofs with squeaking cart behind plod to an unknown market, dragging their bundled man, in sacks, asleep; when the dogs' chains rattle at the farms, and the vixen yelps once, and the owls have fallen silent: then is a grand time to be alive and vastly conscious, when all else human is unconscious, homebound, bed-sprawled, at the mercy of the midnight mind.
The wind had dropped to rest. The powdery stars expanded and contracted in the serene, making a sight which would have jingled, if it had been a sound. The great tor which they were climbing rose against the sky, a mire of majesty, like a horizon which aspired."
Page 149

"That was it, to mean well! He caught a glimpse of that extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare and obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists maintain their truths at the risk of death. Eppur si muove, Galileo was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to continue with the sublime assertion because there was something which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To recognise and to acknowledge What Is."
Page 154

I got T.H. White's The Book of Merlyn in my Christmas box, along with Sophie's World and six present-books. It was White's intended ending for the Once and Future King series, and his intent should not be ignored in this case. The book includes many aspects that were later edited back into the first four books to soften its absence, but it is important to read in its own right despite this. White does most everything he did in the first four books, but better: more beautifully, with a deeper sense of melancholy and resignation, a more thorough look at his problem in general (war and the future of man), and a more centered and charming portrait of the various animal characters (The Committee).

Sophie's World

2008-12-28T04:00:00.001-06:00

"Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outmost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink.

'Ladies and gentlemen,' they yell, 'we are floating in space!' But none of the people down there care."
Page 20

"She had known from the start that her philosophy teacher was eccentric. But when he started to use teaching methods that defied all the laws of nature, Sophie thought he was going too far."
Page 78

"If the human brain were simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn't understand it. . . . We cannot expect to understand what we are. . . . Even less can we expect to comprehend the universe."
Page 329

I made a few comments on Sophie's World in my previous post, but I need to elaborate a bit as per custom. As I've already said, the book is a primer in the history of philosophy. It is also a story, and a decent one at that - if not terribly inspired. The book is essentially two books, which intersect for really only one crucial point (Berkely, if you must know). Aside from the main story, the body of the book is made up of a series of letters and conversations (nothing more than lectures with a few questions), each giving a quick outline of the philosophers Gaardner has chosen. Even if I was already familiar with a decent portion of the things he explained here (I knew nothing of Spinoza, Kierkegaard, and had forgotten Freud; Hegel could always use clarifying, and this is done well here), this is still the best explanation of what this book could and should be for young people, who are the ones who ought to be reading it. More than that, however, it is another of those really beautiful expressions of the value of the philosophic outlook that only philosophy teachers seem to be able to provide (Cf. Mr. Dean).

Edit: I was going to comment on the fact that he mentioned several times (emphasized?) the idea that technology is very possibly going to destroy us and life on earth, and that it has possibly put modern man in a harmful place psychologically as well. Not necessarily a common idea for such a best-selling, mainstream book?

My Times File

2008-12-25T19:53:00.025-06:00

So, the NYtimes website is no longer allowing users to keep "times files", which is a folder on the website where we can save articles we like. Because of this, I have to transfer all the articles I saved to some other place. Anyway, here.

This is from today. (I will read anything that has to do with Faulkner...)

Because Lincoln and Jefferson are my favorite Founding Fathers. (Yes, I consider Lincoln to be a Founding Father. Think about it. He created the Union the second time around.)

I think I already shared this. I love it.

More Roger Cohen on Cuba.

Okay, yes, I'm the kid watching the financial collapse with wide eyes and popcorn.

Everything I ever want to be = this guy.

This is my second saved David Brooks econ piece, which kind of makes me feel like a douche...

Because education is the MOST important thing.

I think I got really sentimental around the election and saved a lot of Obama articles. More to come.

More.

True.

"How to Read Like a President"

More emotional Roger Cohen.

I really like Roger Cohen.

Secretly, I think I just saved this because he quotes Yeats.

And Alan Greenspan breaks my heart...

Unschooling. Sign me up.

Cool! Linguistics!

Cool! Physics!

My personal Muppet fetish.

I'm kind of ambivalent about censorship.

Because the Democrats do need to be mocked by the Times every once in a while, too.

This is startling.

David Brooks writes something that liberals won't hate.

Please?

More cool physics.

Art and science.

Even more cool physics.

And my least favorite thing that Roger Cohen has ever written.

Enjoy.

EDIT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/opinion/15kristof.html?em

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/opinion/l19kristof.html?_r=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/books/19read.html?em

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/business/worldbusiness/24euro.html?pagewanted=1&em

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/opinion/25atran.html?pagewanted=2

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/us/politics/08holbrooke.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE0D7113BF930A25752C1A966958260

http://granma.cu/ingles/2009/febrero/lun9/reflexiones.html

http://proof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/under-the-literary-influence/?ex=1251003600&en=27386acae9377193&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=OP-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M083-ROS-0209-L3&WT.mc_ev=click

http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/in-love-with-a-lincoln/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/us/04poets.html?hp

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/neoliberalism-and-higher-education/?em

http://100days.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/how-kennedy-won-the-house-and-lost-the-south/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/magazine/03european-t.html?_r=1&em

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/opinion/01krugman.html?_r=1&em

http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/no-choice-about-the-terminology/

It's Christmas Morning, and I would like to go to sleep soon

2008-12-25T06:48:00.003-06:00

It is 7 AM on Christmas Day, I cannot sleep (I have now become entirely nocturnal, something that has turned out exceedingly well for me, somehow), and so I have been reading idleThink and listening to music and gathering more ideas. I have become taken with the idea that I am in an intellectual infancy, that this year is some sort of stepping-off point for the rest of my life, and that what has come before was nothing more than a gradual dawn, a series of experiences that have served to familiarize me with the world and a smattering of knowledge, and furnish me with tools, e.g. the abilities to enjoy life, to think critically, to read books, and interact with people.

I feel as though all the books I have been reading lately are primers, introductory texts a teacher would give to pique her students' interests. I imagine my own education, of which I have now vowed to take charge, with the universe itself as my teacher. I imagine the universe, acting through my friends, through synchronicity, and through books, to teach me of itself. And reading the books I have read lately, I feel like these are exactly the books I would assign to my students if I were to be charged with their educations, and then I realize how perfect it is that I have been given them now, as though they were the "summer reading" before my lifelong education.

Books like How to Read a Book - essentially the first thing you ought to read, ever. Will make you want to read and teach you to do it well. Cosmos, the perfect introduction to any study of science and astronomy in particular. The Diversity of Life - a thorough introduction not only to evolution and its processes, but to an appreciation of the natural world in general. Sophie's World - something we ought to give every teenager on the cusp of their intellectual lives. It serves to introduce the philosophical endeavor, its beauty and fundamental wonder at just being, and of course a rough outline of the history of Western Thought and its major ideas.

Happy Winter Solstice!

2008-12-25T02:45:00.004-06:00

A Christmas Tree Ornament

And a Christmas Gift

A Transparent Dream

2008-12-23T15:19:00.003-06:00

Last night, after my internet was cut off around 3 or so, I tried to go to sleep. I couldn't go to sleep. I tried a lot, and ended up going over to my little table out of curiosity to see what time it was. However, instead of grabbing my cell phone, I knocked over a half-full cup of water, dousing all of Alex's books and a few sundry things. Of course, none of them were sun-dry after I doused them with water ;). Anyway, I turned on the light and frantically dried off the covers of all the books (nothing noticeable happened to any of them, rest assured), read my notes on Industrial Society and Its Future to lull myself to sleep, and then dreamt this dream, probably sometime closer to the morning.

I am in a city of sorts with my mother and grandmother and assorted other family, in a store, shopping. My mom sends me to Toys'R'Us to buy some quantity of a substance I can only describe in waking life. It's like wood fiber, like mulch, that you can eat? I later deduced it is the stuff they make frosted mini-wheats out of. I get sidetracked on the way there, however, and stumble into a kitchen. There are several adults there, making little shots of alcohol and passing them down a little trap door into the basement, where there are numerous drunk teenagers I once knew in Cass City (Danielle Delamarter is the hostess of the party, I hear Kristie there as well). Trey is standing in the kitchen, and I talk to him for a while.

I continue on my way, crossing the huge parking lot towards the Toys'R'Us. On the way, however, I come across a wandering pair of Samn and Lauren. I walk with them, and Lauren eventually disappears into my dream-mist. Instead of going to the Toys'R'Us as we had intended to, we end up delving into some dark back-alleys, and finding a little Toys'R'Us instead. They are giving a show when we walk in, playing a Residents song to a mime. Samn immediately gets a job there doing these shows, and performs a number of them in the time we are there (which is a while). I go looking for my mulch, and don't find it - this store has a much smaller stock than the other one. However, I change my jeans.

We leave eventually, and Samn also disappears into the mists. It is dark out, and I am heading back to find my family. I come across a very slight, short teenage girl - about my age, but considerably shorter. She talks to me for a while, and we walk past an open high school gym, in which there is a drumline performing (the Carrolton drumline, incidentally). At this point, I realize I've left my wallet and cellphone in the jeans I changed out of in the store, so I go back.

One thing about that Toys'R'Us where we worked was that they all spoke in these vaguely demonic voices, which is mostly why we left. However, we never suspected anything more sinister. When I get back, I ask the manager woman for my jeans, and she leads me to them. I take my things, but she holds me back for a second, and begins casting a curse on me! After she has finished, I take the paper the curse is written on, crunch it up into a ball, and start throwing these chunks of bones they have laying around at all of the employees.

I return to the street, where the small girl is waiting for me. It is Quite Dark and Quite Late by this time, and I have become not a little freaked out by having a curse put on me and throwing chunks of bone at people. The girl begins warning me about the dangers of this part of the city at this time of night, dangers which she seems to be completely safe from. I have lost what the danger is, but it chases me, and I run from it, and I find a house, a yard, more specifically, and a man's hand reaches over the high wooden fence and pulls me in.

On the other side of the fence we are in Spain. The man is taking charge of me, he is firm but cares for me and wants me to do well. However, I have done something drastically wrong, and have gotten myself in some trouble. I do wish I could remember details of this. In any case, he is sending me to Sweden, where I will be looked after by a group made up exclusively of women.

Waterloo, Ontario

2008-12-21T22:24:00.008-06:00

December 19th. 9 AM.

December 19th. 9 AM. Notice the streetlights.

December 18th. Noon.

Some prevailing Canadian sentiment from my politics classroom.

And the Mounties. Iconic.

(First two and last photo credits to Arju, who will post on the blog someday.)

Drawings Drawings Drawings

2008-12-21T02:00:00.002-06:00

http://locomotor.deviantart.com/

I have created some drawings and posted them up on my new Deviant Art account.

I hope you guys enjoy. I wish to know what one would think.

I could just post them here, but screw shit.

Asemic Writing

2008-12-19T23:02:00.000-06:00

The word “asemic” means “having no semantic content”. Illegible writing or pretend writing could be described as asemic.

Handwriting does not just contain semantic information. It also contains aesthetic information (when seen as a shape or image) and emotional information (such as a graphologist would analyze.) Because it eliminates the semantic information, asemic writing brings the emotional and aesthetic content to the foreground. By contrast, e-mail is writing almost devoid of aesthetic and emotional content, apart from what the words contain. Asemic works play with our minds, enticing us to attempt to “read” them. Some asemic works make the viewer hover between “reading” (as a text) and “looking” (as a picture).

Just another reason why I hate Telephone/Email.

Good Life

2008-12-19T14:42:00.000-06:00

This is Adam's old post brought up on screen, hopefully someone will contribute.

A Slight Essay on Self-Knowledge

2008-12-18T14:51:00.000-06:00

I remember before coming here, that certain people (not that I remember who they are in particular) teased me about going off to gain "self-knowledge" or something. I remember that Charlie Rockwell, my predecessor of sorts, in that he did an exchange year in Mexico through Rotary before going to college at Alma and becoming an incredible percussionist, told me that it was during his time here that he realized what it was he needed to do with the rest of his life.

For the past several years (well, pretty predictably since I read Dropping Out Summer 2006, actually) my primary life plan/goal has been to 1) never work and 2) travel extensively. This plan has led to some consternation from my parents, much gawking in social situations when the matter comes up, and a considerable number of sleepless nights dreading the future. Of course, things don't seem nearly so bad in the daytime, but nonetheless, at night, my brain is for some reason much more prone to irrational fears, and I often fear things I know wouldn't actually bother me too much - hunger, physical discomfort, loneliness, and possibly being arrested. My other future plan, inspired by the of Montreal line "I'd like to marry all of my close friends, And live in a big house together by an angry sea." from the song Don't Ask Me To Explain, on the album Cherry Peal, is to start a collective house and live in it and garden and read and play music with as many of my closest friends as I can convince to move in with me.

These plans have always been quite vague, and not necessarily very ambitious. Having been blessed to be surrounded by a group of friends who deserve to be called nothing less than geniuses, I have sometimes felt the lack of my own creative efforts - Lemon Test writes incredible music, Alex - well, you know all about Alex - and on and on. But my highest claim to creative productivity and accomplishment is being a decent percussionist, who reproduces other peoples' music. And, perhaps because I'm not even particularly good at it, that'sn't been enough for me. So my justification has always been my happiness - I am what you might call an aesthete - "someone who cultivates an unusually high sensitivity to beauty, as in art or nature." My skill is in finding the beauty already there, not in making more, and in living a happy, fulfilled life.

I am not sure if I can clearly articulate what changed, and why this is no longer satisfying for me. Perhaps it's that my ideal lifestyles are merely frameworks - one can be an itinerant traveler and at the same time write poetry, novels, document ant species, study cultural differences, fight for indigenous rights, practice medicine, etc etc etc ad infinitum. And the same is true of someone living in a collective house. Neither of them are ends in themselves. They are more life styles than life goals. As for "cultivating an unusually high sensitivity to beauty, as in art or nature," first of all, I'm already pretty pleased with my abilities in this area, and secondly, it's not a mutually exclusive goal - again, it's a part of a lifestyle, or more specifically, a worldview. And everyone has a worldview, so that's not a goal either.

And thus, I've come into a crisis. The problem is the same as it's always been (mortality), but the aspect has shifted. Before, the crisis was living a happy life. Now, it's a useful life, a life that accomplishes something. And Alex doesn't seem to be around to give me the answer in the form of a life-changing zine anymore. I'm not sure that's fair, Alex. ;(

A Terribly Composed Sad Dream

2008-12-17T19:00:00.000-06:00

I walked down metal halls to the doctor’s office. The doctor looked me over and told me to go to work. As I exited the office another soul passed judgment next door, and another the door down. This continued as far as I cared to look, I would assume that there were millions of us. Leaving this place of judgment I went to another, school. I was a teacher; I taught children about how humans invented the airplane, walked on the moon and had infinite potential. The teaching was secondary, though; the children could not yet walk, let alone listen to a tale of humanities glory. No, my primary job was to watch them and ensure that none of them did anything that the school could be held responsible for.

That was my job, but strangely that was not me. I cared for the children and taught them music and art. I sang them old melodies when they were sad and I showered them with the love that their parents never would. But today was different, I was being reviewed. It was that time of year when the standardized tests were to be completed and to underscore the importance of these tests an official was sent to watch over us. He showed the children his papers, all signed and stamped, telling them that there was to be no talking during the test. Next, he passed out the blocks that the children would touch to show their answers, A B C and D. He eyed me threateningly, as if to say “Stay out of this you have had your year now the children are mine.”

The children all failed the test. Most of them just gummed C the whole time. So I was forced to watch as they were euthanized; each of their beautiful faces contorted in pain. My work day was over, so I went to the teacher’s lounge to see how the other teachers faired. Out of the twelve of us only one had their entire class pass; the others had varying degrees of success, with my class doing the worst. This meant that I would not wake up in the morning if I went home; the school at least gave teachers the option of dying in their sleep.

Arriving at my apartment I took all of my belongings and put them in the recycling chute, otherwise the school would have just disposed of them with my body in the morning. I looked out the window one last time before going to bed, but all I could see was a statue of a person standing on his peer’s dead bodies.