To throw cyber kool-aid at the white cyber-wall and watch it drip slowly into the oblivion of information; the stain fading; the mark on the world equaling exactly .001 -- such is the position of the personal blogger, like myself, throwing out dribs and drabs of wandering thought into the lonely expanses of the virtual cloud.


I never had much use for a journal or a diary (or, even, photographs of events). It always seemed like a lot of work just to preserve a memory -- adding paper-flesh or photo-flesh to an ephemeral thing. Doesn't that cheapen the thing itself? Or replace it? Memories become merely what was written down, saved from the eternal fire of events, a few random whispers from the long scream of time...



I tried a Tumblr for a few days. (click) But I'm not young enough to think my taste in pop culture or love of Starcraft (I or II) or whatever equals some kind of sharable and important meaning -- if I defeat the Zerg, I'll do it on my own terms without shouting about it. We should start a new site called "Humblr" where nothing happens, all the pages are blank, and the contributors are outside mowing the lawn.




I completed Ultima I on an Apple IIe in the early 80s all by myself without hints (there was no internet on which to find walkthroughs). I don't remember exactly how it all went down, but I think you had to sail around the world seven times or some such randomness. (BTW, why does no-one do the space/D&D mix anymore? Are our genres so gentrified?) It was incredibly satisfying and, along with reading Siddhartha in 1983, was one of the major events in my life that makes me the guy I am today. So if screw you if you think video games can't be art. (Unless you are Roger Ebert, in which case you get a pass.)

Lord Byron swam the Hellespont; Lord British sent me around the world. 




Today's special photos become tomorrow's junk. And we pile on more and more junk because we can fit it into smaller and smaller spaces. I'm not against that, per se. I'm just jumping off the collecting memories via blogging train. Perhaps I am becoming anti-remembering. Or perhaps, one creates meaning in ones life by doing things rather than blogging things -- or perhaps blogging is a "doing" -- I don't know. Whatevs. I just find personal blogs tedious. Probably my fault -- I have no single point of view to express through a blog. At least, none that will keep me interested for more than a few posts.




Gene (above) viewed my excitement over new technology with the disdain of a manual type-writer user. As I unpacked my latest gadget he would always grumble: "Is that thing going to make you a better teacher?" Now I could give him an elaborate defense of our tech budget. Still, I got the point that no amount of techno frou-frou is going to make a good teacher. Gene said a lot of other things too. The limitations of blogging are such that I can't write them down here. Blogging puts one in a mental straitjacket -- not wanting to offend current friends or future employers, one steers toward the most banal BS imaginable. All in an effort to stave off bloggers remorse.

A new Smurfs movie? What?!? Is nothing sacred?!?



So goodbye to personal blogging for now. I find I like to actually attempt to craft a written thing, such as I am capable of. So look here for actual memories without the stink of blog on them. Read the final one because it feels like the best. Or don't.




The photos in the entry were created the old-fashioned way, in a darkroom with lots of stinky chemicals. Dodging and burning with bits of cardboard on a wire. Solarizing by half-devloping and exposing to light. Double images made with two negatives. Trial and error, fingerprints and mistakes all intact. I don't begrudge anyone their instant memories; yet I seem to cherish the ones that slowly developed over time just a bit more.

Even though it's what Pooh-bear described as "blustery" -- coldish (not really cool) and rainy -- it's not too blustery to pretend it's summer.

It's not too early to wash the car in roller skates.


It's not too cold to hit the beach on the north shore at Northwestern U.


It's not too freezing to get your feet wet in the cold waves that traveled all the way from Michigan.



It's not too rainy to play baseball in the tennis courts.

A Mango Haiku for good measure:

It's time the mangos yellowed.
Summer light, old newsprint, reef-fish scales.
I don't miss my childhood.

I swear I saw a Saturday morning Good Morning America entry exposing the fact that cell phone apps cause anorexia -- well, so they implied without actually saying so. They found some anorexia sufferers who happen to use their iphone calorie-counting apps to monitor their OCD path to starvation. Do the apps cause the mental illness? You decide! (I can't find the report online now.)

Also, you can use the Good Morning America adult BMI calculator app to see how fast your cell phone apps are killing you. An app to find out if your apps are killing you? There's an app for that!

Luckily, my cell phone has no apps and care barely recognize a text message. This is causing me to overeat. That's why GMA BMI calc says:  "The information you provided gives a BMI of 25.8. Your BMI suggests that you are overweight*."

Tomorrow they are promising to tell us about the "stores where we love to shop... what little secret seeds are they planting in your head?"

In sum, things GMA wants you to be terrified of this week: being overqualified, dying via phone app, and shopping.

S'been awhile since I made a deposit in the blogosphere -- though Mango Haiku is pretty far off anyone's sphere. One thing I meant to do but couldn't get to for Linguistics-test related reasons was writing a review of John Lanchester's I.O.U. Take home point: financial gurus are the abstract philosophers of our age, who wield their computers in a monetary netherworld -- basically they work the shadow puppets in our cave -- to create havoc in the real-world which appears to follow different rules than the world of forms where the perfect money exists; the kind that has no risks. Best pull quote (from memory): The bailouts and other actions of the government amount to "socialism for the rich." Great book -- it takes a novelist like Lanchester to make derivatives accessible to everyone. (Oh, basically the philosophical conundrum that the banks ran in to is that risk can't disappear -- sooner or later risk is risk.

Kristin Espeland Gourlay is all over the place on the web: she launched the Ohio River Radio Consortium, organized, emceed, and recorded a conference that brought together scientists and journalists, was featured on Current.org, and recently did an hour on State of Affairs (by affairs, I believe they mean 'general happenings').




Things to read:

My latest essay appeared at the Bygone Bureau. It's about a notebook that I used to carry about and annoy people with. Names, places and events have been changed and tweaked for those in the know. (And, like, certain good bits were left out because they are way too complicated.)




The internet seems to be a-buzz about this article, but in case you missed it the Vanity Fair article on Roger Ebert is excellent. Also, his remarks on the article. And his post about his new/old voice.

"Virtually no scientist subscribes to the man-in-the-waiting-room theory, which is that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin, but many people report that they feel better when they take drugs that affect serotonin and other brain chemicals." -- great article from the New Yorker, and useful for the class I'm teaching, about what might be called the "depression industry". Recently there have been some very useful articles for my students -- this NY Times article, "The Americanization of Mental Illness," is also interesting.

If you think algorithms are sexy this article about Google should do it for you.

If I was a real blogger I would have a periodic "Good Morning America Terror Watch" -- they really want me to be terrified of the most trivial things: last week it was germs I could get from new clothes (probably there are more germs on the clothes on my floor, GMA, so that's a non-story) and potentially deadly traffic lights. Potentially deadly? Heck, just about anything is potentially deadly. My belly button lint is potentially deadly if rolled into a ball and choked upon. Kittens are potentially deadly if you tape them to your eyeballs and attempt to drive. The great thing about the traffic lights bit is that it also had a "fear the environmentalists" angle -- you see, those tofu-sniffing lefties have forced us to change to energy saving LED traffic lights that don't melt snow like good old "regular" American bulbs. Why do they want us to wake up in the morning frightened of new clothes and stop lights?

Anwyway, here are a few pictures:


Kristin and my daughter in front of the holiday-celebratory tree in Danville, Ky. It's about 45 minutes from our new house in Springfield, KY -- about which more later. Incidentally, are these small-town newspapers built to survive the death of old media better than the major publications?




This new plastic sled is good for deep snow where the traditional sled bogs down.




Today, however, with the snow packed tight the 1914 Flexible Flyer was the winner -- yes, 1914. The 96 year-old sled was my grandfather's -- he refurbished it sometime in the last forty years, but it's the same sled and it still carries all 1XX pounds of me, plus my daughter on my back. It steers like a dream. It's probably the same type that Ethan Frome used in his fateful downhill ride -- and, yeah, that much fast-moving metal and wood could cause some major damage in a crash. If you're not familiar with Ethan, read the mal-adjusted youth summary here. The relevant sentences are: "Ethan agrees that death would be better than going home to his bitch of a wife. So they sled down the hill and hit a tree. But they both survive (as seen on Fox’s World’s Most Amazing Suicide Sled runs in old novels). " Yeah, something like that.

Avatar is kind of annoying. It's such a behemoth and there is such a swirl of claptrap spewn hither and yon about it, that it is hardly worth mentioning on a blog that three people read. Nevertheless the question has been asked by greater minds than mine: is Avatar racist? The answer is, of course, yes it is, in the same uncomfortable, naive way that movies from the early-to-mid twentieth century tend to be.

Look, if you think the natives are either obstacles to be removed (racism circa 1500-1990) or simple folk who would never harm the earth b/c they're so in tune with the f-ing planet (racism 1990-?) then you need, as we said in college, a "paradigm shift". Both extremes deny the basic humanity of the "natives." Now, you'll say that the Na'vi are not human, so who gives a crap  -- it's true, Avatar works on the "big blue alien" level -- yet the movie is still clearly trying to send a message that once again glorifies pre-columbian native-ness as some sort of ignorant, Edenic paradise. The easy acceptance of this message without comment is annoying as hell.

(1990, btw, is when "Dances with Wolves" was released.)


(Human beings sitting in a circle and drinking mud.)
 
As a thought experiment -- what if Europeans had not come to the Americas but every other technological advance had occurred as it did in history? Would the resulting culture drive no automobiles? Eat no fast food? Destroy no forests? Watch no reality television? Murder, rape, pillage, war... are these European constructs? Would you deny the essential humanity of the "natives" -- both the good and the bad, as some sort of guilt-ridden wish fulfillment? If only Europeans hadn't brought their germ-ridden blankets, we'd all be thinking in circles and worshiping Gaia instead of destroying the environment and cheering on the end-times. (Oh rapture!!) Yeah, right.


(Traditional dancing on Pohnpei.)

Speaking of humanity, if you want to cleanse your soul after Avatar, a good wash with Masaki Kobayashi's "The Human Condition" will do the trick. It's a nine-hour, B/W, Japanese (and Chinese) language movie circa 1960. Therefore, it's never going to be shown on IMAX and make a billion dollars. But what it will do is give you some f-ing faith in humanity. Strange, since it's about how the humanity is crushed out of our hero (the spectacular Tatsuya Nakadai) during WWII. Where Avatar's notion of love is facile; Human Condition's is complex. Where Avatar glorifies the "natives"; Human Condition never denies the basic humanity of the conquered Chinese, although it shows how easily this humanity can be ignored by the conquering Japanese. Where Avatar blithely throws the Earth into the dustbin without a second thought; The Human Condition (for all of its brutal honesty, its stark depiction of human depravity) shows humans on a grand scale, capable of complex emotions, not simply good/bad, reacting to a fascist war machine (like Avatar's) with real humanity... While being nothing like War and Peace, it's a faithful an adaptation of that novel's themes as there is ever likely to be. Who makes epic movies about humans any more?

I made my 2nd 2nd annual trek to SchniztelTown in Daley Plaza. The 1st 2nd annual trek was derailed by massive crowds. The lunch crowd today was not so bad -- so I made my way through some sweet cheese fritters, bratwurst, applesauce, and cheese/apple strudel.

A fake German village, populated by real German artisans / pastry chefs, is erected beneath the Picasso every year.




What better to wash down your German repast than some Coke Zero. This Coke Zero give-away was taking place in front of the Thompson Center where the communist party was protesting the anti--abortion-provisos being wedged into health-care reform. (Illinois also just passed some strict laws, which have yet to be enforced.) Yes, the communist party. They have a bookstore nearby.




Here are the protesters in front of "Monument with Standing Beast" by Jean Debuffet. Meanwhile: Bible Zombies?!?!? What's that? A zombie that contradicts itself? A zombie that only eats transubstantiated brains?

Today was an abortion-heavy day -- four students, all of them late, turned in papers on abortion (not the given topic, but a possible topic (except that I ban that topic, along with marijuana (not because those aren't valid topics but because you can't really say much worthwhile in a couple of pages (and anyway, in my opinion, people are too entrenched in their various camps for them to have an interesting argument about these topics)))). Is the "abortion debate" so ingrained that any old 18-year-old can pull an argument or two out of their rear on short notice?




So I was trying all day to come up with a great pro-choice / coke zero slogan. Here's my best shot: "Say goodbye to unwanted pregnancies -- and calories!"

Or instead of "Obey your thirst!" .... "Abort Your Thirst!"

And from there I only have inappropriate thoughts that shouldn't be committed to blog.

On the road between Versailles (Ver-sails) Kentucky and London (Luhhhn-dun) Kentucky we find ourselves confronted with signs for some kind of bluegrass / country music hall-of-fame / old-fashioned good-timey fun. Naturally, we digress from our destination (Cumberland Falls) to check out what fun can be had:

An old barn -and a new barn!?!?! What!?!?! That's cra-za-zee!




The grocery-store merry-go-round is rusted, the rumps of children just a misty memory. The country music themed tchotchke (that's how I spell it godammit!) stores are silent. Sometime you build it and they -don't- come.




Candy canes, empty walkways, and denuded trees. It's a happy place!




Even the crickets have left the country-themed, old-timey streets and therefore can't lend their voices to the chorus of desolation that is this forsaken spot between Versailles and London.




A bronze hillbilly stands behind an aspiring hillbilly.




If you put your head in this hole, you can pretend there are other people here!

We visited the country music store and bought a CD (out of pity). We got a Faron Young CD (I had never heard of him) mostly because there is a song on the CD called "Unmitigated Gall" which seemed like an awesome title for a song. (Though my gall is mostly mitigated.) Faron is pretty twangy and likes to switch from a deep bass to an Orbison-like falsetto. Here's a YouTube video of him in 1961. The other cool thing about him is that he continued to sing even after injuring his tongue in an auto accident. (True story, it came from the liner notes.) I didn't love the whole CD, but my hat's off to Mel Tillis who wrote "Unmitigated Gall". (Really, "unmitigated" is such a difficult word to put in a song -- it's a remarkable feat that it works so well.) Here's the first verse:

"Well, how can you have the unmitigated gall
To come back now, expecting me to fall?
Right down on my knees and kiss your feet? Yeah, feet.
Feet that one day went a-walking out on me
With a fast talking slob, you hardly new his name.
Your mind is de-arranged."

(yes, de-arranged!)