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| author | luxagraf <sng@luxagraf.net> | 2018-09-17 08:06:55 -0500 |
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| committer | luxagraf <sng@luxagraf.net> | 2018-09-17 08:06:55 -0500 |
| commit | b34399bdac634a0b2621ba9579ade56c2beb32a3 (patch) | |
| tree | c26f08246e3de6fb67cdf52882a56972c83690d8 | |
| parent | 7abdf61c24af49f951c0ce1ec7496d60330a20c9 (diff) | |
added recent posts
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2005-03-25-one-nation-under-groove.txt | 99 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2018-08-18_west-to-wall-drug.txt | 40 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2018-08-22_range-life.txt | 80 |
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diff --git a/published/2005-03-25-one-nation-under-groove.txt b/published/2005-03-25-one-nation-under-groove.txt index 01b6364..e2c3593 100644 --- a/published/2005-03-25-one-nation-under-groove.txt +++ b/published/2005-03-25-one-nation-under-groove.txt @@ -10,101 +10,86 @@ slug: one-nation-under-groove title: One Nation Under a Groove --- -<p class="pull-quote">the need<br /> these closed-in days<br /> to move before you<br /> smooth-draped<br /> and color-elated<br /> in a favorable wind<br /> — <cite> Niedecker</cite></p> +> On the meridian of time there is no justice, only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and justice <cite> H. Miller</cite> -<span class="drop">T</span>he sky is falling again. The man outside the liquor store seems unconcerned. The sky seems to fall a good bit. Perhaps the man didn't notice. Perhaps the sky has fallen too many times now. Perhaps it's been falling for quite some time and we're just now noticing it. Perhaps its always falling. Perhaps it never has and never will fall. Perhaps we just really like to say the sky is falling. +Paul Graham is apparently pretty widely read on the web, though I had never heard of him until I saw mention of the piece on Michael Tsai's blog. Since Graham's piece is a touch out of date by internet standards, rather than comment on Tsai or Graham's site I thought I'd write a little rebuttal/extrapolation here. -This latest chunk of sky burling down at us is a brilliant little piece of circuitry known as the iPod. Andrew Sullivan, writing for **<a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/" title="The London Times">The London Times</a>** claims "<a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-1501-1491500-1501,00.html" title="Comment: Andrew Sullivan: Society is dead, we have retreated into the iWorld">society is dead, we have retreated into the iWorld</a>." A catchy headline no doubt, but it's basis in reality is questionable. Echoing this trend is John Naughton's recent article for **The Guardian**, "<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,1396485,00.html" title="A generation lost in its personal space">a generation lost in its personal space</a>." Joining these authors is Christine Rosen who has managed to parlay this topic into two separate articles, **<a href="http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/7/rosen.htm" title="The Age of Egocasting">The Age of Egocasting</a>** and **<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/magazine/20WWLN.html?ex=1268974800&en=fca8190266cc6b78&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt" title="Rosen's NYTimes Magazine article">Bad Connections</a>**. Call it the iPod backlash. +Generally speaking I prefer not to engage in the endless circular dialogue of the blog, but occasionally we all run into those writings which either, as in this case, irk us so badly or cheer us so warmly that we can't help but comment on them. The link from Tsai's site gave me hope that perhaps someone had something intelligent to say about what has to be the most common form of writing on the web — the essay — but, alas, several reads later I found Graham's essay ill-informed, poorly written, full of non-sequiturs and, to be blunt, an exercise in navel-gazing drivel. -The underlying implication of all these articles is that the iPod (and the cellphone and TiVo and the remote control and the mirro and dem Russians) narrow our perspectives and, in case of the first two, make us oblivious to and in public spaces. <blockquote>the proportion of young people who never venture out in public without first putting on headphones is astonishing <br /><cite>-John Naughten</cite></blockquote><blockquote>Even without the white wires you can tell who they are. They walk down the street in their own mp3 cocoon, bumping into others, deaf to small social cues, shutting out anyone not in their bubble. <br /><cite>-Andrew Sullivan</cite></blockquote> +After staying up late one night reading a bunch of his essays I had to conclude that Graham is not only a poor writer but that he makes an ass of himself every time he strays from the technological realm. I can't comment on his LISP and SmallTalk articles since I don't know either of those languages, but his "Things You Can't Say" ranks pretty high on my all time worst list. I would go ahead and say it's the worst thing I've ever read, but then I picked over some transcripts of the recent presidential debates and changed my mind. Nevertheless Grahams's writing is bad. -I have owned an iPod since 2001 and I really enjoy my bubble. I was in a band a few years back and we were recording what would be our only production, a five song ep. For those that have never been in a recording studio and have this mistaken idea that it's all fun and games... well, it's not. Recording music is pretty boring actually. One evening the drummer and I were smoking cigarettes outside our studio and we got to talking about walkmans and the newfangled mp3 players that were just hitting the market. Nice we agreed, but what would be really cool I said, what I really want, is a way to put my entire collection of music in a device the size of a deck of cards. True story, 1995 or so. Buena Park California, sunset iridescent orange. High clouds lending a bit of purple. Swig of beer. Drag of cigarette. Yeah, that would be brilliant wouldn't it? +And yet it has potential. And potential is important. In fact, potential is the reason any of us are writing, but we'll get to that. First I think it's important that we start here at the beginning, with Graham's essay. -And it was. The first few were too small, 5 gigs and then 10, if I recall correctly from a billboard in Redondo Beach stuck in traffic and thinking, holy shit, they're gonna do it. And they did. When the 20 gig version arrived it seemed like plenty of space so I bought one. Unfortunately when I got done ripping all my cds it was almost full. Now four years later I have almost 35 gigs worth of mp3s and I'm needing a new iPod (holding out for the 80 gig model, which again seems like plenty...). +### Mistakes -I am far too much an audiophile however to settle for the cult of white ear buds and in fact have never used apple's provided headphones (too much time spent in the recording studio to trust my music to cheap speakers). No I am actually worse in Mr Sullivan's view, I use noise canceling earbuds from Sennheiser. Even if I turn off my iPod I am still deaf to your social cues Mr. Sullivan. I will even confess that sometimes, when my iPod runs out of batteries, I leave the headphones in just to have an excuse to ignore social interaction. In fact, I find it really irritating when people fail to respect the message of headphones (don't talk to me) and insist that I remove them so they can ask me for a cigarette (no) or a donation (sorry, one step away from the breadline myself). +> Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure. Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one. -<h3>Space is the Place</h3> +Graham's experience with the essay has already diverged from mine. Graham it seems, spent high school doing what was asked of him with no creative potential exercised on his part. That's fine, true to his experience, but not mine. not to say that my high school essays were works worthy of publication, but I do know I didn't crib my ideas out of Cliff's notes. -At the same time I go out a lot with my girlfriend or with a group of friends and never wear headphones. As a writer overheard conversation and snippets of other lives caught accidentally or through purposeful audio voyeurism are very important to me, invaluable even. This is the sort of accidental material that can put you where you ought to be—where you least expected. But at the same time I never knew I would feel quite like **that** as the winter afternoon glare crystallized the spires at the top of the Sixth Avenue Library to the sound of Grant Lee Buffalo's lament of New Orleans. I got the same juxtaposition of the familiar and foreign that I might glean from an unexpected snippet of the overheard. Both have their place (and use from my point of view). +So, here at the beginning of Graham's essay we find ourselves given great potential only to have it snatched away again. We get an invitation to explore "what an essay really is, and how you write one." Now that is almost guaranteed to be interesting. But then the mock self-effacing ego intrudes: "Or at least, how I write one." Now why would I care how Paul Graham writes an essay? This is someone with a low opinion of creative arts whose primary interest and field of knowledge is computer programing. I don't care how Paul Graham writes an essay and assuming that I do is huge mistake on the author's part. -I like to be able to choose whether or not to involve myself in the public space. But the elective to remove oneself from the public is troubling for our iPod critics.<blockquote>Walk through any airport in the United States these days and you will see person after person gliding through the social ether as if on autopilot. <br /><cite>-Andrew Sullivan</cite></blockquote><blockquote>And as a result, our concept of social space will change. Imagine the future: a crowded urban street, filled not with people interacting with one another, but with atomized individuals cocooned in their personalized sound-bubbles, moving from one retail opportunity to another. The only sounds are the shuffling of feet and the rock muzak blaring from the doorways of specialized leisurewear chains.<br /><cite>-John Naughten</cite></blockquote> +One more little quote and then we'll set Graham and his anti-art leanings aside. -Why is it astonishing that a generation which finds itself bombarded with advertising and the crass commercial commodification of public space at every turn would want an isolationist bubble? To me that seems a perfectly logical extension of the culture we have created. Meet me down at the Blockbuster Pavilion where we can catch the Verizon Wireless Presents show tonight and maybe afterward we can head to the Trojan Condom presents DJ Circuit City spinning at Club Walmart. Come on down, we'll have a grand time ringing in the new Year of the Depend Undergarment. <br /> +> The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it. That principle, like the idea that we ought to be writing about literature, turns out to be another intellectual hangover of long forgotten origins. -What Mr. Naughten seems to ignore is the second to last sentence of his own nightmare, one that has nothing to do with headphones and everything to do with cultural changes that precede the iPod—"moving from one retail opportunity to another." This is fast becoming the sum total of our public spaces—retail opportunities. +Paul Graham seems to have had a really wretched time in school. he has devoted a whole essay to scrutinizing the artificial social structure of high school. It's actually one of his better pieces on the site, but it makes me curious about Graham's school experience. I feel bad for him, I really do. Personally I hated the bizarrely pointless physics problems -- blocks sliding down inclined planes -- problems that my otherwise brilliant physics teacher forced us to work out on paper. Writing about literature was an exercise in creative independence after that sort of monotony. Anyway my big question is, who among us isn't aware that the essay is a multifaceted form that far exceeds the limited examples we are exposed to in high school? (For which there is a actually specific term *argumentative essay* rather than just essay.) -Rather than contributing to this sort of corporate co-opting of public spaces, the iPod allows us an escape from the so-called public space. Increasingly that space is not public at all, it's branded private space that views the public as little more than advertising targets. How long before we have advertisements beamed up into the night sky? +I am, for instance, aware that the realm of physics far exceeds the inclined planes I hated so much even though I have never pursued the subject beyond that childish introduction. Graham's patronizing of his readers' intellectual development is rude and, to me, pretty bizarre. Rest assured you will not be patronized here.[^1]. -Headphones are an attempt to avoid the homogenization of the "rock musak blaring from the doorways of specialized leisurewear chains." Is it not the desire to escape the vulgar commercialism of our advert culture that drives us to block out it's monotony? To seek something meaningful in one of the most intimately and meaningful realms—music. To interject back the danger that once lurked outside the burlesque theaters and dance halls that seem to have closed just after Henry and June snuck out the back door. +### What Great Writing Does -<h3>The New (Old) Danger</h3> +Great writing, whether essay or story or poem or other form, is fundamentally the result of process. It is the confrontation with the unknown recorded and given over. The product itself often creates more questions than it does answers, but it is easy to tell whether or not the author had his/her life invested in the writing of it. The result is not on the petty plain that Graham would have it, whether "you got the right answers," but instead explores the troubling reality that there perhaps are no answers after all but only "the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth." -The problem with the iPod for these authors seems to lie in the shutting off of the public space in favor of the personal. As I've already pointed out we the public are losing our collective spaces (have lost?) to far more than the iPod. But, setting aside larger cultural issues like promiscuous advertising, what of the iPod's privatization of public space as these authors claim? +My girlfriend likes to say that if the experience of something is truly great it has in some way helped you prepare for death. And neither I nor she mean this as a kind of melodrama, but simply this is the process. If you do not have a heartfelt stake in what you write your writing will never be any good regardless of your intelligence, education or any other number of factors that we often mistakenly attribute to informing the creative process. -Neither author gives any kind of reason as to why this is bad. They both get abstract and use the iPod as jumping off point for larger concerns. Starting with Mr Sullivan who sees in the iPod the loss of, call it respect for music.<blockquote>Music was once the preserve of the living room or the concert hall. It was sometimes solitary but it was primarily a shared experience, something that brought people together, gave them the comfort of knowing that others too understood the pleasure of a Brahms symphony or that Beatles album.<br /><cite>-Andrew Sullivan</cite></blockquote> +The essay then is a poetry of motion, a poetry of the mind turning over on itself and trying to get at the "the pure potential as potential."[^2] If we disregard the potential as potential in favor of the already known (another reexamination of high school?!), we confine ourselves to a world where everything that can be known is known. For instance: -I don't know about you, but the music I listen to was never welcome in the living room I grew up in. For some reason, my parents failed to relate to or appreciate **License to Ill** or **Nothing's Shocking**. Mr. Sullivan seems to think 'once upon a time' music was confined to the space where we expect it and now, good god, now it's everywhere and no one is sharing or bonding over it. I for one would much rather everyone carried around a pair of speakers with their iPod and blasted them at 11 so music became a truly public space. But apparently I am alone in this desire and there are noise ordinances against this sort of thing. (If this notion intrigues you check out some of the Flaming Lips' experiments with hundreds of simultaneous playbacks to form textures of sound). +> In technical matters, you have to get the right answers. If your software miscalculates the path of a space probe, you can't finesse your way out of trouble by saying that your code is patriotic, or avant-garde, or any of the other dodges people use in nontechnical fields. <cite>from another of Graham's essays</cite> -Typical of a web essays, Sullivan is really just aping statements made a generation earlier in response to the iPod's predecessor, the Walkman. Far more reasoned and persuasive (and lengthy) is Christine Rosen's piece in **<a href="http://www.thenewatlantis.com/" title="A journal of Society and Technology">The New Atlantis</a>**. As Rosen relates in her essay:<blockquote>Music columnist Norman Lebrecht argued, "No invention in my lifetime has so changed an art and cheapened it as the Sony Walkman." By removing music from its context—in the performance hall or the private home—and making it portable, the Walkman made music banal. "It becomes a utility, undeserving of more attention than drinking water from a tap." <br /><cite>-Christine Rosen</cite></blockquote> +That may be good and well for software, but Graham is assuming that there are right answers in realms beyond software (even in the realm of software I would question that assertion, design choices yes, but right and wrong? equations within software can be wrong, but does that make the software wrong?) -I suppose that's one way to look at it. If you swapped "iPod" and "Sony Walkman" for "radio" I might somewhat agree with both statements. But as it is, recorded music has never had a context. It has always existed in the abstract space of our heads more than any temporal location. We are not in the room as it as the music is played we get only an abstracted representation of the music. Recorded music has never been containable, just crank your speakers and enlighten the neighbors. +I for one do not wish to live in a world where there are right and wrong answers at every turn, where everything that can be known is already known. Nor do I want read essays that purport as much. If what Graham is railing against in his essay on essays is the formulaic nature of immature writing then certainly the answer does not lie in the formulaic nature of software. -The notion that music (especially recorded music) has a natural space where it belongs is counter to waht it is—music located outside any temporal location. And if you are worried about the narrowing of public space, locking music up in the private space is not an argument against iPods. It's a safe way to avoid the issue, but it undercuts the other arguement, that personal space is invading public space. Let me get this straight. Headphones are narrowing our public cultural space, but music (in said headphones) ought to remain private space? So the problem then is not the music, but the space we occupy while we listen to it? +In a world where there is no potential to move beyond the known there would be no reason to write. The great essay (and contrary to Graham's assertions there are plenty of amazing essayists in this century, both those writing now, including on the web, and those whose work predates us) is the result of stepping beyond the comfortable, predictable results of the world already known into the pure potential as potential. The result then is the journey back. -I for one don't think music should be consigned to where we feel safe with it. Music is not safe. It should not be relegated to the living room or the concert hall, it should be played in the streets at top volume until the sky really does shudder and crumble. But that option has already been taken away by noise ordinances. So we have gone internal, put the speaker directly in our ear. +### On Some Common Misconceptions About Writing/Art -If anything changes with headphones it's the attention devoted to the music. Music coming from speakers has a directional vector. It approaches you from some point and is blatantly external to the listener. Put on a decent pair of headphones and the music becomes omnidirectional and you are enveloped in it. Close your eyes and you can swim through it and pick out tiny bits of sound that you would never notice coming from an external speaker. For the listener on headphones the experience is both more intimate and more consuming than music from a living room stereo or even a concert hall stage. +As cited above I have been reading a collection of essays called <cite>Art and Reality</cite>. Now generally speaking this is not the sort of book I gravitate toward, but my neighbor is a book dealer and he sold it to me for 25¢. Anyway, I had all but abandoned this article until I read the first essay in this book, entitled *The Elements of "Art"* (which, it's worth noting, was transcribed from Robert Irwin's's keynote address at a 1982 conference entitled *Art and Reality*). -As for the lose of public culture to personal headphone cocoon, is not the mere recognition of white earbuds itself a form of cultural interaction? Even if it be only a nod and smile, is this not even closer to the truth of life, the mystery unfathomed but acknowledged? I know how you feel the nod says and it is good speaketh the smile. +Now it was no accident that above I said the *experience* of something truly great should help you die. I could summarize Irwin's points on the interactive process of art, but it's better if I simply quote: -<h3>Its All Around You</h3> +>So what we have is a structure, a process. And I will identify that as being what is being talked about here: the elements of art, *the elements of the process*. I would like to say that these are really more positions or perspectives, rather than being a hierarchical which assumes there is "a art" and that everything else is somehow subservient to it. I propose that we have instead a process. The first step of the process is the action of inquiry: the idea of looking at that pure potential &mdash the artist as an individual seeking out or re-examining for himself at his moment in time and in relation to the whole body of knowledge up to that moment in time, what we mean by the term art. -Neither Sullivan nor Naughton is content with the iPod as harbinger of doom, the end of social space, the isolationist future of automatons. Yawn. No, it does not stop there, this is the slippery slope down which we all slide into communism and cannibalism and dem russians and dem russians and dem earbuds and dem earbuds and dem dem, damnit the sky is falling why don't you see it? Rosen at least has a more reasoned argument that might actually be on to something. +Art is indeed a verb rather than a noun. The noun that we are accustomed to throwing about is but a historical artifact that is the result of an art-action, to borrow Irwin's nomenclature. Now that is not to pass any sort of value judgment on those artifacts, but rather to say the essay is not the art; the writing of the essay is the art. the essay I the reader experiences (by reading) is an object, what is important is not the object, but our experience with it. So we end up with a noun, the essay, preceded and followed by verbs, art and experience. -She believes that the personalization of media is leading to a narrowing of experience. That's a legitimate fear, one that I don't agree with, but legitimate nonetheless. The other two articles in question just use the iPod as evidence of a larger crumbling that is, rather suspiciously, never clearly delineated. +This emphasis on parts of speech is not a splitting of hairs, a semantic game or a "dodge" employed by one in a non-technical field. It is the fundamental point of what art, in this case writing, is: interaction between individuals mediated by some object. -Mr. Naughton in the Guardian article sounds a bit like Wordsworth calling us all back to the countryside. he even goes so far as to stake his critique partly on recently uncovered Edwardian era documentary films. These movies he claims reveal a society where,<blockquote>Men raise their hats to women; people stop to talk; groups congregate at junctions and street corners. The clear implication is that, for Edwardians, being out in public meant being on display and being sociable. It meant paying attention to what was going on around you, and acknowledging the existence of others.</blockquote> +It has long amused artists to hear technophiles and, for lack of a better term, suits, expounding on the wonderful interactive nature of the web and how this can revolutionize art (naturally here in its cultural baggage form as a noun) and society when in fact art is and always has been an interactive experience mediated by a static medium. The web remains every bit as static as a painting or an essay. That we describe our experience with it as interactive is a result of the obviousness, not the uniqueness, of its interaction. -Beware all calls for a return to past glories. Assuming for a moment that people act naturally in front of a camera and that they weren't in fact congregating to discuss the weirdos at the end of street pointing lens at everyone, so the Edwardians were more self-consciously aware when out in public. Does that make them role models of public behavior? They were also more elitist, racist, and classist as well; should we emulate those behaviors too while we're out for a Sunday stroll? +Interactivity on the web requires a gadget (a computer) which is perhaps what clues us in to the fact that our experience is interactive, whereas art in other forms is often not mediated by a gadget so its seems more remote (especially given the gadget fetishism of our times). Perhaps another reason the interactivity of the web is so obvious is because it comes directly into our living room. There is no need to travel to the museum or library, it's all right here at our fingertips. -In researching this little piece I found several nice rebuttals to Sullivan's piece. The best of which is by a man named Jerry Stratton in an essay entitled **<a href="http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=92" title="society never ends, it just fades away">society never ends, it just fades away</a>**. Stratton rightly cuts past the iPod intro of Sullivan's article and addresses what Sullivan really wants to talk about.<blockquote>His most worthwhile observation was that iPod users sometimes accidentally break out into out-of-tune singing to whatever is on their pod. But he seems to think that it's bad, whereas I stand with Joni Mitchell that the more out-of-tune voices, the better. And that's the real point of Andrew's editorial. The proliferation of multiple viewpoints runs the risk of isolating individuals so that they hear only the viewpoints that they want to hear. We as individuals need more out-of-tune voices. <br /><cite>-Jerry Stratton</cite></blockquote> +But I think it's important to note that the writing of an essay is not fundamentally an act of expression or communication, something that Irwin nicely illustrates by posing the question: "can you think of anything that is not expression?" If everything is expression and communication how then would we differentiate between good essays and bad ones? For that matter, what differentiates essays from email? What we need is some better means of qualitative judgment. -This is also Rosen's concern in both of her essays, that our means of consuming information (for her the mirro, remote control, TiVo, and iPod) are narrowing our exposure to new ideas. By meticulously selecting content that we already know we like we are even less likely to discover the new stuff. Couple this with "smart" search algorithms that pick recommendations based on what we already like and our chances of encountering the shocking, the challenging or the potentially enlightening approach nil according to Rosen. Without these sorts of jarring, chance encounters with the unknown we cease to think outside ourselves. This may well be true, but it's always been true. Conservative viewers are more likely to tune into Fox news because it fits their pre-existing worldview. Liberals read the the New York Times and watch Woody Allen movies. This is nothing new. It has always taken conscious effort to find viewpoints outside your own reality tunnel of beliefs. +### Why the Rote Essay is Rampant on the Web -I fail to see anyway in which the iPod contributes to this trend. In fact it may well go against it if only by virtue of its ubiquity. On college campuses for instance many students swap headphones to see what the other is listening to. The iPod's ease of use and the easy availability of mp3s make exploring new music simple—hear a band on someone's headphones, go home and fire up a torrent search, grab the album, slap it on your iPod and be enlightened. Illegal? Certainly. Potentially life enriching? Certainly. +So after picking on Paul Graham so extensively, let us salvage the gist of what I think he was trying to say. Essays on the web are often not very well written and lack the confrontation with the unknown that marks great writing/art. -<h3>No Alarms and No Surprises</h3> +Now many people would herein proceed to argue that this is because we lack filters (i.e. editors, publishers, etc) to catch the bad stuff before it is disseminated to the world. There is of course some merit to this argument. I find myself often linking to Salon because the quality of writing published there far exceeds the other nine Google hits I get. And it might be that Salon's quality of writing is higher because it employs editors, but there is another more optimistic way of looking at writing on the web. -When you come down to it, how is the iPod any different from other music devices that use headphones? It's not. It's just the latest harbinger on the chopping block if we mash our metaphors for a moment. +With the disappearance of the filters that have shadowed writing for the last few centuries we finally have an opportunity for anyone to write about anything they please. Now this can have some serious downsides as we will explore in a a minute, but there is an upside. Universal exposure means that in simple terms of numbers there is a much greater possibility of finding great writing on the web than the new release table at your average bookstore. Even with my limited math I can process the law of averages. If a million people are publishing there is a much greater chance that there will be someone creating something great than when the poll of possibilities was limited to those with access to agents and publishers. -At the same time, the targeted nature of new modes of consumption do raise some issues for thought. Are narrowly targeted ads (i.e. users who bought x also bought y...) constricting our exposure to the unfamiliar? Maybe, but as illustrated earlier there has always been a tendency to seek the familiar, the safe, the comfortable, the expected. +A friend of mind used to often say that at any given moment the best band in America is probably playing for two people in a garage. The same is very likely true of writing. -But even that doesn't always happen. The gravity of this potential danger, if we may call it that, that comes from targeted advertising depends greatly on the realm in which occurs. If we are talking about the realm of politics then this kind of marsupial burrowing is decidedly bad. If you bought Bill O'Reilly's book (presumably he has one) and the suggested "you might like..." stuff is more of the same, then yes your worldview remains narrow. But in the realm of art where the political statement is often less overt, less likely to be partisan, more likely to be complicated and often not there at all, then the suggestion might be welcome and can lead one far from the sources that suggested it. +But we have overlooked the fact that we do have filters on the web and it's very likely that if anything they're worse than those we left behind. Google is our filter and Google is but a collection of algorithms. At least with traditional publishers there were those few that staffed their offices with truly passionate human beings who really cared about writing. Can an algorithm care about writing? -For example let's say you really like Jay-Z and so when the new album comes out you pre-order it on Amazon.com. The "you might like..." screen claims that people who like Jay-Z have also purchased Outkast. So you figure, what the hell I'll pick up this Outkast album. Turns out that those who purchased Outkast also bought both Stevie Wonder and Sun Ra. Hey, why not? You buy them too. If you're a fan of Jay-Z but have never ventured into Sun Ra territory, well, you're about to blow your mind. +Much to my dismay if you type 'the essay' into google, Paul Graham's drivel comes up as the seventh link. This is precisely why there is no link for it here. -In my own experience, I find that I tend to read books that mention other books. So I read the other books and maybe they mention some other books and on it goes. I don't see a significant difference between that and the Amazon suggestions. Or potentially TiVo's suggestions or any other targeted marketing. In the realm of the arts nothing is so much the same that it cannot lead to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation" title="Theory of Six Degrees of Separation">something ever more different</a>. +In a way the web is what our founding father's feared most — a tyranny of the majority. If the more sites point to it, a site gets the highest rank. In that sense it's our own fault that the drivel is prevalent. -It seems that to a certain extent the authors in question here are specifically concerned with the potential narrowing of political capital, which is a concern given that democracy depend on the existence of a multitude of voices. Are we losing that? Well that's a larger question and one that does not necessarily relate to remote controls, TiVo or the iPod. +In closing let me leave you with some more thoughts from Irwin: -<h3>You Were Wrong When You Said Everything's Gonna Be All Right</h3> +>Ideas don't just come into the world *ad hoc*, or they don't just come in a sort of idle or free way. They come first to be weighted and justified in terms of their relevance, in terms of their impact, and in terms of how they might thread themselves into that body of knowledge. The process of weighing is really made up of all those people who are interested in what we mean by the concept of art. I would like to define that as "culture" (rather than how the word has normally been used) — as really a practice, culture playing back on the society as something deeply threaded into the society in the critical sense that this body of knowledge is culture, is civilization. The first action, a critical aspect, of culture is the weighing of any new idea in the light of the body of knowledge and the examining of its relevance and whether or not it's a worthwhile idea, and whether or not we should make any commitment toward the character and potential of the idea. And then the dialogue has to do with how it is threaded into this body of knowledge. -Though it is odd I would say such a thing, it almost seems to me that all three of these articles smack of a bit of leftist sentimentality. After all isn't it the video-game-addicted, pill-popping future parents of America that are somehow responsible for this political mess we find ourselves in? Isn't their apathy the very thing that has gotten us eight years of GWB and friends? If they just took the headphones out of their ears, put down the remote, turned off the television and read a couple of books none of this would have happened right? Nice dream, nice dream... - -In fact this notion of iPod=evil represents the same simplistic thinking that has landed us here in Dubya land in the first place. If easy prescriptions worked to solve our problems we wouldn't have the reactionary mess we have. And I don't mean that in partisan terms. I think we can all agree that America is somewhat of a mess right now. I don't think one political party or the other is as fault. We are all culpable. And we are all looking for solutions. - -I don't believe in the techno-utopist future of completely wired life and peace through blogging, but I also don't believe in the techno-dystopist future where we all unplug and discover our heartfelt love and meet in central park for an earbud-free hug-a-thon. Reality is much more complex and to avoid it authors like Sullivan resort to cheap, easy sentimentality.<blockquote>but what are we missing? That hilarious shard of an overheard conversation that stays with you all day; the child whose chatter on the pavement takes you back to your early memories; birdsong; weather; accents; the laughter of others.<br /><cite>-Andrew Sullivan</cite></blockquote> - -A lovely piece of sentimentality, it almost makes me want to take out these headphones and listen to the silence of the house. But as Wallace Stevens' said "sentimentality is a failure of feeling." Sentimentality is false feeling, pseudo-feeling and affectation. And Mr. Sullivan's quote above is the most embarrassing episode of mindless sentimentality I can think of right now. It fails to account for all kinds of complexity and depth ever-present in our lives. - -Sentimentality is the easy answer: the birds, the laughter, the children (followed shortly by the the bullshit, the bullshit, the vomit, the vomit). Real feeling involves complexity, it rejects the simple. To realize that there is more to it than unplugging, more to it than any technology, more to it than a sound bite you can pass off as heartfelt—that is actually the very essence of the problem: the failure to engage your surroundings as anything other than a simplistic snapshot of what you wanted to see. Does Sullivan acknowledge the ugliness? Never. He skips right over it and tells you what you wanted to hear. Sullivan's sentimentality does the very thing he accuses the iPod of doing—he narrows your reality. Never for a second does Sullivan acknowledge that the birds might be endangered, headed for extinction, that the weather might be worsening with global warming, that the laughter of others might well be cynical and cheap or that the children are living below the poverty line, abused etc, etc. This the same sort of narcissistic thinking (I am observing, where the emphasis on I and observe is equal) that gave us romanticism, is it any wonder that these authors look too fondly at the Edwardians? Everything looks good from the lazy middle class intellectual point of view. Edit out the things you don't like and you too can narrow your reality to the point of irrelevancy. - -Please do not mistake me for a cynic though. I use this example merely to acknowledge that there are things below the surface that we can happily ignore if we are constructing the world to our own desires rather than recognizing the complexity that is inherent in it. - -<h3>...And I Feel Fine</h3> - -Perhaps the problem with the iPod is so ephemeral it's slipping through our fingers. Perhaps there is no problem with the iPod. No harm in headphones. No danger to run from save the desire to have a new danger to run from, a new evil to fight because the real one is just too big to tackle, a new threat to declare war on because the old one just bores us to death, a new something to rage against because the dying of the light seems inevitable and unvanquishable. Perhaps the new danger, same as the old, is our own failure, our own sentimentality that show us the world not as it is but as we wish to see it. - -At the same time I encourage everyone to, as Robert Anton Wilson often suggested, change reality tunnels. Point your RSS reader to sites with viewpoints you don't share, something outside your belief system, something you might even consider crazy. Listen to what these viewpoints are saying and think critically about why you do or don't agree with them. There has never (not even yesterday) been a day in the history of humankind when you have had so much information at your finger tips. Take advantage of that and see where it leads you—hopefully where you least expected. +[^1]: For those of you electing not to actually read Graham's essay allow me to continue his thoughts in this footnote. It turns out that the "intellectual hangover of long forgotten origins" mentioned in the quote is actually, according to Graham, the study of law. Apparently law was prevalent in medieval seminaries. I can't vouch for that but it sounds right. Medieval religious types did need to have some good rhetorical training to defend the contradictory-to-observation belief systems that they held. +[^2]: **The Elements of "Art"**, Art and Reality. ed. Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan, Talonbooks Vancouver, 1986 diff --git a/published/2018-08-18_west-to-wall-drug.txt b/published/2018-08-18_west-to-wall-drug.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8f6dd6d --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2018-08-18_west-to-wall-drug.txt @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +We left Lake Superior the historically correct way -- heading west, watching the trees thin out until they're gone and the there is only grass and sky. + +To be truly historically correct you must be driven out by someone else. This is how the Ojibwe left when they were driven out by the United States, how the Sioux went when they were driven out by the Ojibwe, and how whomever the Sioux drove out probably went as well. These days we have it easy, we get driven out by our own engines. + +Over the course of a couple of days driving, the trees disappear and then, rather suddenly, you find yourself surrounded by sky, on the seemingly limitless plains of South Dakota. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-05_132309_snake-river-rec.jpg" id="image-1620" class="picwide" /> + +The first night out of the Great Lakes region every campground we tried was full. We ended up in a hotel. Driven out by crowds. + +After that we spent a couple nights at a South Dakota state park, mainly for the receipt, which we needed to become residents of South Dakota. + +Just as Delaware is home to corporations, who come for the tax breaks and whatnot, South Dakota is home for full time RVers who don't want to pay state taxes anymore. All you need to do is sign up for a mailing address (which forwards your mail to you), stay one night in a hotel, RV park or anywhere that give you a receipt with your name on it, and your previous ID. We're now legally residents of South Dakota, though we'll always be Georgians in our hearts. + +With our receipt in hand we headed west, stopping off at the Missouri river for a night. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-07_161119_snake-river-rec.jpg" id="image-1621" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-07_161817_snake-river-rec.jpg" id="image-1622" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-08_065835_snake-river-rec.jpg" id="image-1623" class="picwide" /> + +After that we abandoned the back roads we usually stick to and headed down I-90 toward the Badlands and South Dakota's other famous landmark: Wall Drug. + +Wall SD is one of those places that no one would have ever stopped in were it not for one woman who gave them a reason to stop there. Ted Hustead bought Wall Drug in 1931. At the time Wall had 231 residents and pretty much nothing to entice anyone else to ever come into Hustead's new drug store. His wife hit on the idea of offering free ice water to travelers headed for the newly opened <span class="strike">travesty</span> monument, Mount Rushmore. Back before air conditioning, ice water was no small enticement in these parts and it worked. And if water worked, think how many more people 5¢ coffee will bring, think how many more a giant jackalope will bring and so on until the tourist phenomena of Wall Drug had become something significantly more than a drug store should ever really hope to be. + +Today Wall somehow manages to be terribly touristy, yet charming in its quaintness, even if that quaintness is itself a well-crafted enticement. Some things when examined too closely threaten to accidentally unravel the entire universe. Don't dig too deep into these things. Still, the billboards are small, understated and feature photos of food seemingly lifted straight out of the illustrated pages of the 1953 Sears, Roebuck and Company catalog. It's quaint. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-22_114036_badlands.jpg" id="image-1625" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-22_113820_badlands.jpg" id="image-1624" class="picwide caption" /> + +The even stranger part is that inside the display cases of Wall Drug -- the cases themselves looking not unlike something that might have been sold in that 1953 catalog -- the food really does look just like the pictures. I still can't figure out how they pull that off. + +Wall Drug is more or less a full city block of tourist junk and food, and yes there's still free ice water, and the coffee is still 5 cents. The donuts are pretty good too. Bill Bryson sums up Wall Drug perfectly in <cite>The Lost Continent</cite>: "It's an awful place, one of the world's worst tourist traps, but I loved it and I won't have a word said against it." + +You can't pass through these parts without stopping at Wall Drug. Something will entice you in. For me it was the donuts, though later I discovered the gas station sold them too, so I didn't have the wade through Wall Drug just to buy a donut in the morning. + +Head due south of Wall and you'll run into the west entrance to Badlands National Park. About a mile before you get to the national park entrance there's an unmarked dirt road with a barbed wire gate and small sign that says "Please Close Gate" and has a small logo of the National Forest Service. Open that gate -- close it behind you! -- and then you're free to camp pretty much anywhere inside Buffalo Gap National Grasslands. There are "campsites" along the dirt road, which threads the edge main ridge that becomes the center of the Badlands. Pretty much anywhere there's enough space to pull off the dirt road and not slide down the cliff there's signs of someone having camped. We grabbed a small pullout about half way down the road that had amazing views of the canyons and ridges that make up the Badlands. + +We liked it so much we stayed for two weeks. We'd have stayed even longer if we could have, but two weeks is the limit for federal land. It's probably just as well, otherwise we might be there still. + + diff --git a/published/2018-08-22_range-life.txt b/published/2018-08-22_range-life.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2c16b35 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2018-08-22_range-life.txt @@ -0,0 +1,80 @@ +There's something about wide open spaces that makes time slow down. The vastness of the sky stretching around the endless hoop of the horizon overwhelms and dims our sense of clock time. There are only four times out here: sunrise, sunset, night and day. After that all is one open expanse of light and land dancing around together, indifferent to anything so mundane as the railroad time schedules that form the basis of our concept of "time". + +The vastness and timelessness of the Badlands makes the improbable seem less. Wall Drug, I'm pretty sure, would never have worked anywhere else. + +After land and light there is only wind. It never stops, or at least it didn't in the two weeks we were here. It ranged from a gentle breeze to a howl that drowned out every other sound and whipped a fine dust into the air. The sky was often hazy from the smoke of fires in California and elsewhere in the west. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-08_200216_badlands.jpg" id="image-1638" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-08_200458_badlands.jpg" id="image-1639" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-22_065130_badlands.jpg" id="image-1654" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-10_154816_badlands.jpg" id="image-1640" class="picwide" /> + +Camping in Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, the area south of Wall SD, known as "the wall" is unique. Free camping with a view, less than ten minutes from to a town that has a dump station, free water, free swimming pool and a small, but decent grocery store is not something you find very often, which might explain why we stayed two weeks. + +The first week we were out here was hot, in the high 90s. We can only run our air conditioner if we have hookups, which we obviously did not have, so the free public pool in Wall was a daily necessity. Every afternoon the kids and I would pile in the car and drive the ten minutes to Wall and go swimming in the deliciously icy cold pool for a couple of hours. + +<div class="cluster"> +<img src="images/2018/20180808_180329.jpg" id="image-1656" class="cluster picwide" /> +<span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2018/20180808_171223.jpg" id="image-1655" class="cluster pic5" /> +<img src="images/2018/20180809_092135.jpg" id="image-1659" class="cluster pic5" /> +</span> +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-11_170749_badlands.jpg" id="image-1641" class="cluster picwide caption" /> +<img src="images/2018/IMG_20180808_143355923.jpg" id="image-1658" class="cluster picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-16_154634_badlands.jpg" id="image-1652" class="cluster picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-13_200859_badlands.jpg" id="image-1642" class="cluster picwide caption" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-13_201312_badlands.jpg" id="image-1643" class="cluster picwide caption" /> +</div> + +Lest you think we've given up on seeing the sights, we did one day drive into the Badlands National Park proper. The first overlook on the drive in gives you a view of the other side of the Badlands from what we could see at our camp. After that you wind down into some of the more colorful of the formations. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-14_123157_badlands_6aDWWQY.jpg" id="image-1661" class="picwide caption" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-14_133337_badlands.jpg" id="image-1646" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-14_124702_badlands.jpg" id="image-1644" class="picwide" /> + +It was pretty, but also very crowded. I'll take a slightly less expansive view and no crowds any day. We did get to have a close encounter with some big horned sheep though. It started off normal enough, Olivia spotted some bighorns up on a hill and we stopped to watch them for a minute. They'd wandered by our camp a few times already, but they never got too close. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-14_125547_badlands.jpg" id="image-1645" class="picwide" /> + +Eventually a Yellowstone-style traffic jam started to happen as more and more cars stopped to watch the sheep. We jumped back in the car and went on to the visitor center. On our way back the sheep had decided to come down to the road. + +<div class="cluster"> +<span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-14_145756_badlands.jpg" id="image-1647" class="cluster pic5" /> +<img src="images/2018/20180814_140030.jpg" id="image-1657" class="cluster pic5" /> +</span> +</div> + +One day Lilah and Elliott and I decided to go for a hike in the Badlands. We found a trail that lead out to a juniper flat about three miles away and was somewhat off the beaten path. It turns out though that nearly everything beyond pavement is well off the beaten path in the Badlands. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-16_103537_badlands.jpg" id="image-1649" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-16_104958_badlands.jpg" id="image-1648" class="picwide" /> + +This is not a place people hike. It might be that after mid morning there's absolutely no shade anywhere until late evening. The midday sun is fairly intense, and after an hour or two you want a break. We went a couple of miles and in that distance saw no one and found only a single cottonwood tree to rest under. It was the only shade for miles and all the grass under it was trampled down and matted with clumps of fur from sheep, cattle and quite a few other things that had rested under the same tree. + +We ate our snacks, contemplated going the rest of the way to the juniper flats, but we remembered [resting under a juniper tree in Chaco](/jrnl/2017/06/arc-time) and decided the cottonwood was a good as it was going to get for shade, so we started back. + +Lilah's shoes were giving her a blister so she walked all the way back barefoot, which I think made to two hikers we met at the trailhead, who were geared up with all the latest tech from REI, feel a little foolish, which, let's face it, they should. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-16_120224_badlands.jpg" id="image-1650" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-16_122716-1_badlands.jpg" id="image-1651" class="picwide caption" /> + +A day or two after our hike, storms started to blow in more regularly and we got not just a break from the heat, but downright chilly, especially at night when it started dropping into the 40s -- a little reminder that winter comes early up here. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-08-18_173401_badlands.jpg" id="image-1653" class="picwide" /> + +From our campsite at Buffalo Gap we watched a lot people come and go. Most people only stayed the night, but a few hung around longer. The sort of people who come camp out in a place like this for more than a night are generally our sort of people, which is to say, people who live full time on the road. + +One day a family with some kids pulled past us and parked their rig in a spot a little ways beyond us. They stopped by to say hi one evening and we got to talking and next thing you know all the kids had made friends and were roaming the range in a pack, the way I think kids should. + +If I have any hesitations about living the way we do its the occasional thought that I should be giving our kids more opportunities to roam the neighborhood with a pack of friends the way we did growing up. There's two problems with this notion of mine though. One is that no one back home lets their kids roam anywhere, let alone wander the neighborhood by themselves, so if we hadn't done this our kids still wouldn't be roaming the world in packs they way I think they should. + +The other problem is that the whole idea that this is what kids should do is predicated on the assumption that my childhood was somehow a "correct" one, which, for all I know, is completely wrong. + +One thing I do know is that this trip has erased any sense of shyness in our kids. They'll march up to pretty much any kid they see and try to make friends with them, which they didn't do before we left, and is really more than I can say for myself. + +Whatever the case, I do love it when we meet people our kids can hang out with for a while, it's even better when we get along with the parents too, which we did. We hung around Buffalo Gap a little longer so the kids could have more time together. Community is harder to come by when you live on the road, but when you find it, it tends to be tighter knit and you value it more I think. At least I do. + +At the same time those moments of friendship and community don't last as long and before too long we needed to start south and Mike, Jeri and their family needed to get to west before the cold comes, and it comes early up here. + +After two weeks Buffalo Gap had started to feel a bit like home, much like every place where we've spent more than a few days. But we did what travelers do: we pack up, say our goodbyes, and head down the road for the next place we'll call home. |