fringe journal

Iraq, American Soldiers in Iraq, Werewolves of Paraguay and War: El Luison

2012-01-21T08:48:00.005-06:00

"The wild dogs of Najaf, Iraq, ate well this week." Those were the words I heard on Fox News Channel just before I went to sleep as I followed different accounts of what American troops experienced in Iraq. Now it is sometime past 3 am and something is breathing next to my bed - an animal presence. I look over and see three black dogs looking up at me. Something is warm and hovering just over my body, something is pinning the duvet cover down around my legs. I feel my temperature rise, and I am filled with strange longings mixed with dread. With a start, I awaken completely.

For audio, please click here & start at the 4:00 minute mark.

http://beyondutopia.net/podcasts/luison.mp3

I'm not quite awake, but I'm not asleep. It is night. I am not sure of the time, or even of the place. I've been traveling a lot lately, and it's not unusual to wander around for a few seconds in that space between wakefulness and sleep and not quite know where I am. That does not bother me. What does bother me is the sense that there is something in the room with me. Red glowing pinpoints of light. Is it a smoke detector? The sound of the fan partially masks the sound of soft exhalations.

I'm in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow territory, but I'm not familiar with any werewolf tales around here. Is there a folk tale or myth that describes what I've just experienced? If there is, I'm not familiar with it, at least not where I live, a couple of blocks away from the "20 Mall" with a Dunkin Donuts, Price Chopper, Blockbuster, two local banks, Subway, Magic Wok, Eckerd, and an open 24-hours CVS pharmacy. I'm in the U.S., but I'm suddenly thinking of the small, poor, landlocked and largely unknown country of Paraguay.

In Paraguay, folklore met urban legend in Sombras en la Noche, an X-Files-inspired television series that was making a big splash in November 1996, when I arrived in Asuncion, the capital, for the first time, in order to give a few lectures on American film and literature and to start investigating Paraguayan women's literature. One of the members of the audience came up and introduced himself to me as Carlos Tarvajal, a Uruguayan film director working in Paraguay. He screened several of the episodes for me at the Universidad Catolica in Asuncion, and I was instantly fascinated. From a U.S. standpoint, Sombras en la Noche was a pretty low-budget affair, with hand-held cameras and film that looked more like something shot for a reality television show. Actually, come to think of it, it was a precursor of reality television, or a cousin of Cops, since it purported to document things that really happened in rural Paraguay.

The most popular episodes had to do with a small town plagued by a luison, a werewolf-type creature, but many times more ghastly. Drawn from indigenous Guarani folklore, the luison is a hideous wild dog-like creature with razor-sharp teeth and red, glowing eyes that feeds on cadavers it takes out of crypts and tombs in the cemetery. Even worse, after feeding on the flesh of the dead, it turns its eyes on the living, and feeds on them as well. The luison devours the soul of the living, and thus toys with one's fate. The luison lives among the townspeople as a normal human being during the day. However, one a full moon, he reverts to his beastly form, leaves his home, and begins feeding in the cemeteries. http://members.tripod.com/lio/mitolo.htm

To fully understand how and why Paraguayans consider the luison to be the most horrible of the creatures of the forest, night, and dreams, it is helpful to have a basic familiarity with Paraguayan folkloric creatures. The indigenous peoples of Paraguay are the Guarani, who lived in the forests, jungles around Iguazu Falls, and chaparral (the "chaco") region in what is now Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Their influence has remained, and in fact, Paraguayans have two official languages: Guarani and Spanish. The Guarani language is similar to Anglo-Saxons in that it creates nouns and adjectives by combining concrete nouns. Abstract concepts are related to concrete examples, which create a very metaphorical (and thus poetic) language. States of being are often expressed in terms of transformation, where an individual undergoes a metamorphosis and becomes a creature. For example, animals of the forest are thought to be able to metamorphose into a physically altered state which often corresponds to their inner condition.

What makes the luison much more ghastly than the average werewolf is how the myth became reanimated and changed with the devastating Chaco War, fought for three horrible years (1932-1935) between Bolivia and Paraguay in the arid, semi-desert Gran Chaco. Although Paraguay won the war on paper, the cost in human life was staggering. Fought in the inhospitable lands where there are numerous tropical diseases, poisonous plants, snakes, scorpions, insects, and animals, stinging thornbrush, quebracho, and absolutely no potable surface water, the suffering of soldiers on both sides was grisly. There was no way to bury the dead, which rose to a total of 100,000 by the end. Many died of malaria, thirst, heat exhaustion, and infection. Both nations were desperately poor, and could not afford to get adequate supplies to the troops. As the commands of both sides made suicidal decisions, the wild dogs came out at night and fed on the bodies of the dead and dying. More nightmarish than seeing one's dead comrade be eaten by a wild dog, was to see a wounded fellow-soldier being gnawed alive. The luison had returned, with a monstrous intensity. When the surviving soldiers returned home, they returned with stories of luisons. As poverty, hunger, economic collapse and war stress set in, more died of tropical diseases. Buried in the above-ground crypts in glass cases, it was easy to imagine a wild dog with supernatural strength, razor teeth and the ability to shape-shift. I could see the luison tearing the flesh of loved ones, and the preying upon the hopes and dreams of the living.

"It was a way to explain post-traumatic stress syndrome," explained Luisa Moreno, a Paraguayan writer familiar with Guarani traditions, whose short stories and poems written in both Guarani and Spanish incorporated folklore. In addition, she had spent two years investigating the sad state of public mental health care in Paraguay. "Instead of saying that he was suffering from depression, or having a psychotic break, you can just say that the luison stole his soul."

It was not hard to believe. It was a good way to save face in the villages, particularly when it was fairly hard to disguise the weird behavior, the propensity to roam around at night, to scream at shadows, hear voices, howl at the moon, weep at nothing, sleep in cemeteries.

I had not thought of luisons for several years, until August 2004 and the bloody battle of Najaf, Iraq, fought in and around crypts and above-ground tombs holding the bodies of the Muslim faithful.

"The wild dogs of Najaf, Iraq, ate well this week." That's what a young Marine told a reporter covering Najaf. Photographs showed exhausted Marines sleeping in the dark shadows of crypts and tombs.

The Iraqi insurgents, who did not have the ability to recover their dead, dying, and wounded, left them in the streets where they fell. The Marines said that wild dogs fed on them, gnawing off arms and feet. The dogs even lurked in the shadows as they were finally able to bring their dead out of the street. Did the Iraqis have werewolf or luisons in their folklore or mythologies? If so, certainly those beliefs would be resuscitated in this nightmarish slice of hell.

"The stench of death is overpowering," said one Marine sergeant. I wondered what would happen, sometime in the future, if the smell of death would trigger flashbacks, horrible memories. I remember attending a wake in Asuncion for a young man killed in a car accident almost a year to the day that his older brother had been killed in an accident. Ordinarily, the bodies are buried within a day, but it was Semana Santa and no one could find his father, who was somewhere in Argentina. No one wanted to bury the poor man's only remaining child without his knowing, so there was the mother awake now for three days straight, her voice hoarse with weeping, kneeling at the side of her son, and Tia, kneeling also and chanting the rosary, tears dried on her face. I went to pay my respects and was shocked at the odor. Despite the meat-locker chill of the funeral home and the banks and banks of carnations, gladioli, lilies, and other flowers, nothing could disguise the smell of putrifying human flesh. Even now, when I smell something similar, I am immediately transported to that scene, and I can't control the flood of thoughts and memories.

There were wild dogs in the streets of Asuncion. Not many, that's true, but they were definitely there. One little black, skinny one was hiding in an open storm drain. He looked hungry and I tossed him a chunk of chipa guazu, a bagel-shaped Paraguayan corn and cheese bread cooked in earthen ovens and delivered to street vendors during the early dawn hours. A big piece spilled out of my bag. The dog scooped up the small piece and then darted to the bigger piece next to my leg. He brushed against my ankle, causing me to jump in surprise.

"Don't ever pet a wild dog," said Tia. "They carry diseases and other bad things." There was something in her voice that caught my attention and made me think of the luisons. Don't pet a wild dog. It could be a luison, a descendant of one of those tragic and doomed Chaco soldiers, destined to roam the streets and howl as it scavenged scraps and realized that no one, just absolutely no one would ever pet it. It could turn on you. It could bite you. And, it could steal your soul.

Late at night, when the memories flood my mind and my heart, sometimes the only way I can deal with it is to drive, drive, drive under the full moon or go to the gym the instant it opens at 5 am and run on the treadmill until the anxiety subsides. Why do I feel this way? How do I account for it? Do I say that I was brushed by a luison?

And when the young Marines battle the demons invoked by smells, sounds, and images, what will they do? How will they account for it?

Just say they were brushed by a luison. Everyone will understand. And then, pray, pray, pray for them to get their souls back.

(this first appeared in E-Learning Queen in a slightly different form)

Yes, I'm Over the Handlebars (Again)

2011-08-18T10:15:00.006-05:00

Downloadable Audio file / Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/handlebars.mp3

I saw her clip the wall, literally fly over the handlebars of her bike onto the cement bike path.

Oxygenation in the stream: roiling, churning bubbles effervesce upward, outward, away. They hit the rocks, turbulent and then they splash, wet energized spray into the air.

Fish thrive in pools of pure bubbles and charged water as the molecules break apart, release energy into the stream, into the ether - the zeit-stream, if you will … and when those charged particles come together, it’s raw, pure convergence, and your mind flies with it, marshaling forces for ongoing and ever-undefined forays into the unknown.

Weren’t you once complacent? smooth laminar outpourings of thoughts, dreams, ideas, material liquid self, and then you hit the rocks, where the light hits the spray of water, and you could see the full spectral flow – the purple blue green yellow orange red of a bright, proud rainbow.

I saw the whole thing – in fact, she rolled like a pro and ended up 3 or so feet away from where I stood. She was bleeding at the elbow, and there was a gouge in her helmet. A lesser cyclist would crack a shoulder, snap a fibula.

It was on the Boulder Creek bike path where it splits into a “Y” – one arm goes under the Folsom Street Bridge, the other to street level. I was sweating, taking the half-mile hike to Benson Hall on the Colorado University campus in high heels, tight skirt, ridiculously expensive Donna Karan pantyhose tights with waist-level elastic that sprung itself useless after only ten or twelve hot water washings…

Boulder Creek churns down the mountainside, cold and yellow and filled with the bacterium of existence. Under the Arapaho Bridge a “stream observatory” had paused the day before to peer through porthole plexiglass windows inserted into a reinforced concrete wall (part of the bridge).

Watch the fish? Watch the bubbles? Champagne? Mountain Dew?

Breathe in. Breathe out.

You don’t know where you’ll end up next.

“Are you okay? You really know how to take a fall.”

It was all I could say. She stood up. Amazingly, just a scraped elbow. No medi-vac to jet to the nearest hospital, no ambulance to transport the body to the morgue.

Flash memory: South Canadian River (Oklahoma), summer 2000.

Dirt-biking involves a different kind of flow – dunes, quicksand, braided stream in drought conditions.

Dirt bike hits Jeep.

Jeep wins.

16-year-old dirt-biker lying broken on the ground. The next morning’s Norman Transcript gives it a mention on page 3 under “Fatality at River.”

It was not easy to accept that the sweet-faced person I saw lying crumpled on the sand was dead.

Thank God my Jeep was not that Jeep. Mine was one that was simply there to explore the dunes.

Who would ever think that when you popped up on the dune, you’d run smack into a dirt-biker with the same idea, just with two wheels and no exo-skeleton (unlike the Jeeps: 4 wheels, replete with fully hardened exoskeleton).

****************************

So let me tell you about Camp Cimarron. It was the all-girls summer camp I went to when I was 10 years old. I was a Campfire Girl, just “flown up” from being a Bluebird (for second and third graders). The camp lasted a week. I had just finished the 4th grade. We slept in cabins. We took classes, but I remember very little.

In contrast, the three years I went to the Baptist Camp Nunny-Cha-Ha in the Arbuckle Mountains are very clear to me (grades 4, 5, and 6). It was also very different than the large Arrowhead-type Camp Kickapoo (Kerrville, Texas), where I stayed for 5 weeks. Camp Cimarron was less about the other campers, the counselors, the people, and more about the place itself: the river, the sand, the water, moon and stars and hot, dry air at night.

My favorite place at Camp Cimarron was a sand bar next to a cutbank on the barely-flowing except in flood Cimarron River where the river had eroded the bright red Garber-Wellington sandstone. Ledges felt like large nail files. The sand under our feet felt like rough, hot, calloused hands rubbing the arches of our feet and the spaces between our toes.

One night, we camped out under the stars. Bright starlight. How could anyone possibly sleep? New moon, no city lights – the Milky Way looked like fog, and the nearer and brighter stars were celestial river sands, sinuous and meandering in and out of consciousness.

Infinity comes to you in the form of restless, half-dark, half-light mind, when you’re sleeping rough, stretched out on a yoga mat under a cotton sheet, wondering about life, love, the smell of night, and creeping hot breath of scavenger birds and coyotes.

What do you do when you’re ten years old and you already know that the feeling you have when you’re touching the earth, feeling the hot, dry wind, and hearing the soft slip of waters over sand, will haunt you every time you close your eyes?

**********

There is an obligatory “full circle” element here. I need to refer back to the woman I saw take a dive over her handlebars.

I need to discuss the oxygenation process, and the way that turbulence engenders life and creative self-expression.

It’s not very appealing, though, to construct such a nice, tidy narrative.

After all, I’m sad, and I’m not happily oxygenated by the combined behavioral determinants of gravity and foolish optimism.

I’m aware that the place anyone takes themselves when infused with euphoria has to do with their perceived need to retreat back to their own minds, into their “happy places.” It also has to do with what they do to trigger euphoria.

If it’s an exercise addiction, it’s one thing. If it is all about expensive, commercialized products (“solutions”), then I think the persons are involved are sacrificing their hearts, minds, and futures.

Is it worth it? You decide. I can’t.

The breeze was cool during the meeting. Their hearts trembled in anticipation.

Oxygen, turbulence, pain, hope.

It was the perfect way to push oneself over the handlebars of life.

Videographer: Dave Feiden

http://youtu.be/YgdD8yXIP8A

Route 66 Rest Stop in the Texas Panhandle: New Technologies & Encounters

2011-03-03T13:37:00.000-06:00

First, I want to apologize for the wind noise -- it is, however, the Texas Panhandle! Sorry about that, but if you can slog through, please share your thoughts / experiences in the comments section.

Here are thoughts that the Route 66 truckstop brought to mind-- New technology leads to unexpected encounters. It's been that way from the very beginning.

Let's think about it, Route 66 was built because of emerging, evolving transportation technology. People became mobile, and they also met people and had encounters they never envisioned before.

Today, communications technology and social networking are also leading to surprising encounters -- with people, ideas, places.

Earlier technologies, such as navigation technologies in Europe, as well as what I like to think of as "financial technologies" (early stock / trading companies, limited partnerships, in and after the Renaissance).

Now we're in all kinds of new technologies -- we blink our eyes and we miss five or six iterations. Does it matter -- at least in the way we structure our "technologies of the imagination"?

Route 66 Rest Stop Series: #3 - Route 66, Kitsch, Memorabilia, and the Artifacts of Recollection

2011-02-28T13:43:00.000-06:00

When we stop along the road at historical sites, what do we encounter? How can we use the experience to reflect upon what it means to explore connections, and what kinds of memories and emotions are triggered? The American love affair with the car has shaped the American imagination, from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to Kerouac's On the Road and all the wonderful road films.

Please post your thoughts, and lists of truck stop experiences, memorabilia, food, music that you find unforgettable (either in a good way or a bad way!) -- if you have Route 66 experiences, that would be especially nice.

Murder, Suicide, Self-Immolation Clusters: Observations

2011-02-14T07:03:00.003-06:00

I often wonder about strange synchronicities and repetitions -- things that you start to see once you know the history of a person or a place long enough and well enough.

In the case of a person, it may not seem to remarkable that the same things seem to happen to them -- after all, they're making choices, and the choices are going to align with their tastes and proclivities, right?

In the case of places, it's sort of different. It makes me wonder if there are certain vibrations or resonances that create a situation where people behave in similar ways. I'm not talking about the obvious things -- people go swimming near bodies of water, or do daredevilish things near cliffs. I'm thinking of something that causes people to behave as though certain places were haunted, or that there might be the presence of spirits that compell people to behave in certain ways.

Case in point: Norman, Oklahoma

I've been in touch with Norman and Norman's history to be able to detect patterns -- even without a very extensive analysis, and without reaching back into history.

For example, there seem to be "murder - suicide clusters" in certain places in the town. For example, my parents' house adjoins two homes where people either committed suicide, committed murder, or both. The "murder suicide house" was built in the 1960s -- it was an ugly yellow two-story ranch house at the end of a long drive. Their lot was long, and the back part adjoined my parents' lot. I would never have known about the history of the house, except that my parents wanted me to purchase the house in order to secure the acreage and to have adjoining lots. I might have been interested -- the price seemed relatively reasonable -- except for the knowledge of what had happened there. There was no way that I would occupy a house where a doctor, who, receiving the news of terminal illness, decided to kill himself and his severely disabled wife.

That house was next door to a house where, 30 years or so earlier, a suicide had taken place. It was the mother of one of my classmates. I think it happened when we were in 5th grade, but I may be wrong. It could have been when we were in junior high school. At any rate, it was most definitely a tragedy. I had no way of truly comprehending it at the time, and I'm not sure I would be able to do so now. It's very disturbing.

Another violent cluster exists on the west side of Norman, near the edge of the South Canadian River. Back in the 1960s, two teen-agers were murdered in their car where they were presumably making out. It became the "Murder of Lover's Lane" and achieved a bit of notoriety for the fact that it was widely believed that a corrupt, dissolute cop had killed them. Why? Who knows. He was known to have been a kind of voyeuristic "bad cop."

How is this a cluster? I had not thought of in that way until a few weeks ago, police dug up a woman who had been murdered, ostensibly by her lover (and not a bad cop), and then buried in the back yard of a house for sale that had been unoccupied for more than eight months.

What linked the two? Crimes of passion. Crimes of perversity.

In the case of murder/suicide, I'd say they were crimes of despair.

I recently watched the TV footage of all the immolations sweeping north Africa, and I was reminded of images from Vietnam, when Buddhist monks immolated themselves in order to shock / horrify the populace to realize how civil war was, in essence, self-immolation -- exceedingly painful and ultimately self-destructive. Needless to say, the gesture fell on deaf ears.

However, immolation sort of gained a foothold in the U.S. during the 1960s -- not because the self-immolators wanted to show how they were a sublime metaphor for what was going on. No, the American self-immolation gesture was almost always something else -- an expression of despair and self-hatred; a cry for help gone horribly awry; the ultimate narcissistic gesture not to say self-loving, but to say that my pain is bigger than anyone else's, and I have to express it in this over-the-top, grandiose way -- and -- oops, well, it hurts, and, oops -- it's fatal.

I deeply respect the Buddhist monks' view. I only wish they had not felt the need to kill themselves to get their point across (a point which was never gotten across anyway). Yes. Civil war does the same thing as setting yourself on fire. You burn. You suffer extreme pain. You ravage your body. And then -- either slowly or less slowly - you die, and people don't care that you suffered and died. So -- the end question is, why even bother with civil war? Why start it? Why not resist violent confrontation? If you wonder what it will do for you as a culture, just witness the monk's immolation. That's the dominant metaphor. Don't forget it.

People who see patterns are rarely rewarded unless it's a pony at Saratoga.

People who see the big picture metaphor in a person's work of art or self-sacrificial gesture of resistance are few and far between. They tend to be fellow artists or writers -- they don't have much political clout.

I don't know what to say except to express the opinion that to sacrifice oneself in order to create an enormous, all-encompassing metaphor usually ends badly. So, I say, just don't do it. Say what you need to say, but don't hurt yourself. Focus on the sweetness of life. Of course, that's hard to do when you're feeling so much existential pain that all you can do is resonate with the great, global weltzschmertz / world pain that, in your own living, breathing experience, is overwhelmingly painful.

Don't give up, my friend.

We've all been there. For a guy, it might be a gun. For a women, it might be pills and an eating disorder. The weltzschmertz takes no prisoners.

But, somehow, patterns do. So, my thought is this - if you find yourself in a very destructive pattern, consider moving. There have to be "lucky" places as well as haunted and cursed, right? Go to a happy place and heal. Then, take stock of your life an think about what you might do in the future.

I'm at that point, and it's surprisingly pleasant.

A video shot at a rest stop on old Route 66 in the Texas Panhandle.

SkyBook - Yesterday's Facebook: A Page from Tinguely's Journal

2011-02-11T21:27:00.000-06:00

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/skymaps.mp3

Does it ever seem odd to you that many of the world's civilizations were pyramid-builders?

How did they all happen upon that particular architecture? Every child who has ever experimented with blocks has found that the most stable edifice is a pyramid, so perhaps it's not so earth-shattering as it may seem that so many people decided to try their hand at a pyramid.

But still, why is it that they seem to have so much in common?

What if the solutions are in the stars?

Let's think about this.

Back in 1,000 BC, the stars were absolutely brilliant. They were bright. The constellations were in your face. Imagine the night of a new moon. The moon could be so bright there could be moon shadows. It's hard to imagine from the vantage point of today's cities.

Brilliant stars, maps in the skies. The night sky was so fascinating I'm sure that during the new moon people dragged around exhausted during the day after staying up all night watching the skies.

What were they watching?

What if they were looking at star-based blueprints? What if there were blueprints for buildings, structures, etc? Okay -- and let's get more extreme -- what if the sky was yesterday's Internet -- a shared repository of image-based knowledge. Images blended with oral traditions. It was a scary time. Very little was written, scratched in stone, or carved into cuneiform.

Forget mp3 files. Forget avi. Forget everything that could be made dead, like paper.

With digital spontaneity, are we more like the star-gazers than the Francis Baconian "New Atlantis" Royal Society types? A printed page is static.

Oral tradition and knowledge gleaned from the ever-moving skies are fluid, and aggressively mediated by society and human desire.

Knowledge gained through social networking is fluid, ever-evolving, mediated by human desire (and tools -- technology).

Tools of transmission: technology.

Ancient technologies? Tools of transmission? What were they?

The stars themselves, but oral tradition -- frozen (and ultimately misrepresented) by glyphs, cuneiform, diagrams, art.

At any rate, it's food for thought.

Ice Storm and a Body in the Backyard

2011-02-03T11:12:00.000-06:00

podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/snowbound.mp3

Last week, they found a woman’s body buried in a neighbor’s backyard. Granted, it was not a next-door neighbor, and it’s true I did not know her. Yet, I felt a grip of sadness blended with revulsion. Her children said they never liked the woman’s boyfriend. The woman’s mother said she knew her daughter loved the man who eventually killed her. The four-bedroom, three-bathroom red brick house in the once expensive neighborhood did not look like one where you’d find a body – it’s a mere mile away from multimillion dollar homes. But, that particular house (on a nice corner lot) had been sitting vacant for 8 months, and the ex-con killer was a “friend” of the owner of the house. Some friend. There had to be more to the story than met the eye.

When the huge ice storm rolled in, it came accompanied with thunder and lightning. Ice fell from the sky as flashes of light and loud cracks of thunder made an unsettling prelude to the foot of snow and inches of ice that would soon coat the entire countryside.

Electric ice.

The guys at the office building refused to clear the snow while it was still loose and fluffy; consequently it turned into an ice brick at least four inches deep in front of the doors, on the steps, walkways, and the porch.

Ah yes, and I was reminded of how much I love / hate snow and ice; it’s so lovely to see it pile up, and it’s nice when it’s so cold your nose burns when you inhale. Snowboundedness has its charm. It’s interesting to see how your mind goes into different nooks and crannies when you’re feeling contemplative, thoughtful, uninterrupted except by your compulsions to raid the refrigerator one more time and to run through the array of movies you can stream on hulu.com and the latest youtube videos. It’s also nice to lose oneself in podcasts, especially the ones that tell us people’s stories. Revelations, confessions, unveilings: it feels as though it’s happening to me – I’m crawling through the dark, wet basements of my own heart. And still, the ice beats against the window.

We’re getting used to these rough storms.

We need a new narrative for the twenty-first century. The old political and economic narratives are just not working.

Could we say the same thing about the psychological and sociological narratives? Oh yes, I believe so.

The connectedness we claim that occurs with social networks is really disconnectedness. Don’t you see it?

Yes? No?

You read this and you think you’re connected to me, and I hope and pray I’m connected to you, but I’m really just connected to thoughts I throw out there to the cloud, to be (I hope!) ever-present, ever accessible. And yet, it means that they’re always out there intensely ephemeral and I’ll never really take possession of my own thoughts, my own essence – and I’ll never really touch you. I’ve lost that ability. All I have is the ability to envision the concept of touching. But you’re not really able to get into my heart the way you once were able to, and I’m not able to crawl deep into your nerve endings.

We just aren’t that raw any more. We have the soft armor of “the cloud” which keeps everything nicely phantasmic (isn’t that what we should, by rights, call the images we see, the noises we hear, and yet can’t really embrace … can’t ever really put our arms around their vital, beating hearts – all we get is this nice, infinitely echoing simulacra).

But there are some narratives that seem to be utterly timeless, even though we would prefer them not to be –the apocalyptic narrative, for one.

I was once loose and fluffy but somewhere along the way, started to melt, refreeze, then melt again.

The cold draft curls itself around the floor, the walls, the sliding glass door, which is surprisingly clear considering it’s 2 below zero out there in the cold, dark Tulsa night.

If I say I have real feelings -- I still remember -- what will you say?

I used to look at life in one way; then started to look at in an utterly different manner. What changed? All that empty space in the sky? I’m not entirely sure.

Emotional freefall.

I used to let myself leap off various intellectual cliffs, with little or no regard to the fact I might not ever come down. Groundedness was not something I particularly desired – to be weighted down without those soaring thoughts that took me out to distant planets seemed to be one of the saddest facts of consciousness one could possibly imagine.

There are still things I won’t tell anyone. I won’t share the night panics, the dark fears in the middle of the night, the refusal to let anyone ever enter my home or my apartment unless it was to clean, repair, or to go with me as I grabbed my keys, purse, and computer on the way to a road trip of the mind.

It was cold tonight when I made my way across the frozen street. I had almost forgotten the way that snow crunches when it approaches 0 degrees Fahrenheit. You take the chance to walk across the street with nothing but your wits and your ability to slide on wet, uneven ice that grips the asphalt.

This morning, I saw a man walking down the snow-packed side street, relief flowing through his eyes and his entire face. He had a 12-pack of Budweiser still in the plastic bag from QuikTrip. Did the blizzard have the unintended consequence of propelling addicts and alcoholics into unwelcome detox? I could only imagine the discomfort of cramps and hallucinations in the 3 degree pre-dawn hours.

Breathe in deeply even though the cold air burns your nose.

It takes courage to do what you’ve done all your life. You’ve examined your own thoughts with the idea of developing the ultimate “urtext” to knit together all those distant hot suns that twinkle like cold little nightlight stars in my heart and my mind.

You’re letting yourself think your own thoughts, listen to your own mind.

I’m not there any more. I prefer to let the workplace exigencies dominate my own narratives; in other words, I’ve become an approval seeker, and I have substituted the security of a predictable cause-effect relationship (customers want a product, I deliver it, they reward me with a pat on the back, and I happily eat the treat tossed my way) for the randomness and unpredictability of thoughts / emotions. I’ve learned to discipline my mind. I have learned to marshal my emotions. I’ve learned to manufacture “bliss.” And, I’ve forgotten how to be a human being.

In the early twentieth century, the possibility that we’d build robots that would eventually supplant and rule us was a terrifying possibility. We were, as factory workers, quite inferior to machines. Later, androids become not just more physically predictable but also more cognitively agile.

Then came the bionic men and women of the popular imagination.

Now, with our tools, we are already bionic. We don’t even need genetic engineering and medically engineered implants and parts.

It’s easy to think of ourselves as invulnerable as long as we’re on the inside looking out to drifts of snow and cold, dark skies.

But then, the frailties kick in. We get bronchitis. We get the flu. We pull tendons and we aren’t able to assert ourselves in the same way. Do we get kicked out of The Cloud? Do we become invisible, except for the false self that gets the most hits?

I’m not sure how to ask you these questions. You asked me if I’d come apart if you left me (died), and we both know the answer is “yes.” Is the fear of loss any reason to avoid being together? Yes, of course. That’s how it is these days. If things can’t be perfect, we’ll just stay in our web-surfing haze.

Obviously we need to learn how to enjoy the pain of our own humanity. I’m not very brave. So we must enjoy our lives now, no matter how trite that sentiment might seem. That’s what it means to be brave.

Despite the permanence and impermanence of The Cloud, you and I are neither permanent nor impermanent. We just run, run, run trying to outdistance the awareness of our existential condition.

And, well, I feel sadness for the poor woman whose body was buried in the backyard of a soon-to-be foreclosed house.

Money Is A Technology

2011-01-28T14:42:00.000-06:00

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/moneyisatechnology.mp3

Money is a technology used for leveraging time. I could go a bit further and say that it's a technology for doing a kind of time travel, but that would disappoint the people who like to think of time travel as something Jules Verne or Dr. Who, where you go to places in parallel dimensions, or to the same place, but see it as it will be. Planet of the Apes.

People like to say that money is a tool.

Sure, it is definitely that, but I'd like to posit that credit is a stronger, tougher tool than mere money.

Credit is a technology by which one can avert or forestall a Malthusian disaster.

Use credit to buy seeds, equipment, fertilizer, and other inputs, as well as processing, storage, distribution.

Credit is one of the most effective technologies ever invented. It multiplies the money supply, and helps get capital into the hands of people who will truly make it productive.

The only flaw in this technology is that it is not so much a mechanical technology (using machines, etc.) as a "belief" technology which requires faith and a collective suspension of disbelief. Everyone needs to accept the instrument as real, viable, and ultimately defensible (by someone or something -- the major entity of the day).

************************
Money and Sports and Time: Gambling is another time technology

Sports outcomes contain built-in uncertainty, which make sports amenable to gambling.

How does time factor in it? The outcomes are worth something before they're determined; not so much afterward (except in terms of developing hierarchies).

People place their bets before the sporting event take place (kind of obvious).

Gambling is another time technology.

Are sports economically meaningful without gambling? Is enthusiasm for sports really muscled by its pure entertainment value? Does it contribute to the informal economy in an aggressive way because of gambling -- or, time technology?

Sports-themed restaurants are not so much about the sports as much as they are all about themed networking.

I'm tired of women sportscasters complaining about being treated strangely in the guys' locker rooms. To me, it's painfully disrespectful to hold interviews in locker rooms, regardless of gender.

What's next? Interviews in the bathrooms? In the stalls?

What happened to maintaining a locker room as a sanctuary for the players and coaches -- no outsiders allowed -- EVER.

The Perry Mason Time Travel Diaries: Into the Film Noir of Our Lives

2011-01-21T15:49:00.000-06:00

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/perrymason.mp3

My son gave me a full set of Perry Mason episodes -- all nine years -- a year ago for Christmas, and it has brought me untold hours of joy. I love watching them -- I've watched many episodes -- especially the first two seasons -- many times. The later episodes are a little harder to watch; the videos were burned from recorded videos, and they are not in the best condition. They skip, get hung up, and do other annoying things. The shadowy black and white is great, though, and it's amazing how much of the action takes place at the witching hour -- midnight or near it -- and how rainy and dark many of the locations are. I love it. The episodes filmed after 1962 seem a bit heavy on the method acting -- it's as though the cast has gotten too far into A Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Iceman Cometh, and any / all Tennessee Williams plays. The gothic lighting of Elia Kazan (echoes of German expressionism and Fritz Lang) is reinforced by Perry Mason's questionable ethics and his cat-and-mouse maneuverings.

The cat-and-mouse game seems, at first blush, to be with Lt Tragg and DA Hamilton Burger (Los Angeles -- pronounced often with a hard "g") and with law and order, but each episode reveals that the true cat-and-mouse is with Occam's Razor, and the facile assumptions that flow from appearances. If any two-word slogan could epitomize Perry, it would be "appearances deceive."

Over the last year, there have been a few times when, after weeks and weeks of pushing myself to work 18-hour days (okay -- I'm including tennis in that calculation -- take out tennis, and you've got 15 - 16-hour days), I've taken to my warm, comfortable, and rather small upstairs bedroom. With a laptop on my lap, and my portable DVD player at my side, I sit, propped up with pillows and in soft flannel pajamas (and fluffy slippers) -- working on various projects from work, while watching episode after episode of Perry Mason. I love the theme -- the 1965 version of the theme song totally grooves; there is a baritone sax melodic line that is absolutely unforgettable; it gets into your veins, nerves, organs, even -- and you just groove with that dark, smoky, intimate sound until tears come to your eyes.

I'm not sure which episodes I prefer. Most Perry Mason aficionados seem to think that the first and second seasons are the best. I will say that Perry is much more rogue-ish, and some of the lines seem to be double-entendres of the most shameless stripe (in "The Sulky Girl" Perry says he's holding out for a "sulky boy" -- which, if you're a viewer who has not been watching closely and do not realize he's referring to the impending birth of a child of his client, a hard-to-handle "sulky" heiress -- strikes you as amazingly outre.

It's one of those golden closeted moments -- Perry Mason -- represented by Raymond Burr, a gay actor who had invented an entire mythology of heterosexuality, including three wives (who died tragically), a son (who tragically perished from leukemia), a heroic sojourn in the Marines (Iwo Jima?), education at Ivy League schools, and a childhood in China -- when you just can't believe he's outing himself in such a bold way, with no "wink-wink / nod-nod" but a explicit, sexually honest statement about his animating urges...

Well, upon re-watching the episode, the actual context made the line, "I'm holding out for a sulky boy" quite pedestrian, even patriarchal -- the girl heiress had been such a handful, that it was perceived as quite natural to root for the birth of a boy -- not only would he preserve the line, he would also serve as a sane, stabilizing male force.

Lovely ironic double-entendres -- I think they were probably unconscious -- but perhaps not.

In other episodes, Della advocates for the "damsel in distress" potential client by pointing out her physical attributes: "she's quite lovely" etc. Perry always takes the bait, and takes on a client that, presumably, he would have spurned, if she were old, plain, or simply uninteresting.

The frumpy clients always have a certain "je ne sais quoi" quality -- that either makes them pathetic ugly ducklings (where "nature's green is gold") with potential; or aging and/or indigent clients whose personalities serve as foils to Perry & Co. -- showing the dark, noirish, yet noble qualities of Perry, Della Street, and Paul Drake. In one episode, the formula was put on its head via a disconcerting off-the-cuff exchange: Della Street: "Perry, she's quite lovely" to which Perry retorts to ask why she never describes the men --

If you don't know the true sexual orientation of the cast, it's easy to applaud Perry's statement as a proto-feminist freedom-fighting against sexism.

However, if you know the true sexual orientation, the statement is filled with irony, wonder, and a deep, dark acknowledgment of the human condition.

In fact, it's this darkness, this subtle world of the double-entendre that most attracts me to the first two seasons. On the other hand, the later seasons pull me in because of the fundamental darkness of consciousness itself, where Perry Mason distinguishes himself with anti-communist / anti-progressive pontificating, while still plunging into the heart of darkness -- into the worlds inhabited by troubled, conflicted, flawed protagonists who repeatedly self-destruct, self-immolate, and psychologically self-mutilate -- they become reminders of how fragile the human psyche is. In doing so, the later episodes of Perry Mason are amazing tributes to individualism and the notion of deliverance as something radically courageous because it allows the individual to be multi-faceted, complex, and often contradictory; and yet, in the end, a symbol (or entire narrative) of salvation.

So, when I sit in bed, sipping hot coffee laced with gingerbread-flavored coffeemate and sweetened with stevia, stretching out in my flannel and micro-fiber fluffy slippers, I'm drawn to the darkness behind the personae -- after all, aren't we all in the same boat... ? My public persona is very tailored -- I prefer dark jackets, white blouses, narrow skirts (think flight attendant garb); it's a corporate uniform. Yet, I know I have to pay a high price for all those days when I'm "on" and I'm in all-day meetings and am aggressively launching / promoting / facilitating programs and concepts. I'm aware of the darkness within -- in my case, it's all about self-doubt. In the Perry Mason "noir" world, it's all about longing, fear, despair, envy, loss, hunger, and -- above all -- helplessness. There's "Rage Against the Machine" but how about "Rage Against Existential Helplessness"?

Noir is incredibly seductive. The honesty it engenders transcends words. It's freedom through honesty -- existential honesty. It takes a lot of effort to overcome the cognitive dissonance we have to deal with when we muscle our own identities into compliance with what the world seems to be telling us what we should be (I guess you could say that we pay a price as we go into a socialization process)....

Best case - it requires energy to adjust ourselves so we can enter the stream -- reminds me of the way natural gas has to be compressed in order to be able to enter the pipeline, which only takes line pressures that are sufficiently high --

Also well, it takes a lot of effort to beat ourselves into submission.

Film noir openly acknowledges -- even celebrates -- the fears and insecurities that drive people to beat themselves into submission; and, the fears and insecurities that accompany those who tried to beat themselves into submission -- to conform to the status quo -- and who failed...

I'm not sure if I'm making my point, or if I'm expressing myself with sufficient clarity ...

But I want to explore this topic and I welcome your thoughts and responses.

Dena Baab: Response to Valerie Fox's The Glass Book

2011-01-17T20:16:00.001-06:00

Critical Thinking Essay by Dena Baab, written in conjunction with an English composition course at Florida State College Jacksonville, Fall 2010. For the "Thought Block" prompts, please scroll to the bottom of this article.

I chose to write this essay on the suggested alternate writing, The Glass
Book by Valerie Fox (The Glass Book: http://www.zenzebra.net/fox/glassbook-lite.pdf). After reading “They know about fish”, I must admit I
was a bit confused by it, and wondered if I just wasn’t having an open
mind.

Thought Block #1 - The kinds of scenes and ideas that come to mind don’t
really even make sense to me. When I read “people adopt them as pets
and put them on TV”, I first thought of aquariums. Then I began trying to
widen my view into a different perspective. If they were speaking of
possibly a TV show or documentary, I felt like the “tables and desks with
things on them called computers” was maybe referring to all the people
and paperwork involved in putting together a TV show. It wouldn’t be just
about the two fisherman anymore.

However, I still feel like I might be off-base about this story. In a different
direction, I’m thinking that maybe the debacle is some form of debate and
this is two government officials. I think what’s makes the fisherman
authentic is their down-to-earth appearance and ability to appear as
heroes. People will believe what they want to hear and follow those that
tell them exactly that.

I feel to be authentic is to be real, genuine and honest. You have to BE
these things, not just act that way. Eventually, the truth will come out and if
you are just acting a part, people will see you for what you really are. You
can be honest without being brutally honest and hurting people’s feelings.
If you are genuine and true, it will show through and people will not only
see it, but feel it as well.

Thought Block #2 – In “Well Met”, I felt like I was watching a scene unfold.
I’m on the edge of my seat, waiting to see what will happen next. I think
each specific “snip-it” draws my attention . The entire piece reminds me of
an actual dream, because you are zipping around from place to place to
person to person. You’re always trying to get somewhere, or find
someone, and you usually wake up before you accomplish that. The kind of
stories that seem to fit these poems might be children’s books. Maybe I
am way off base here, but the poem just makes me think of Dr. Suess
stories and other children’s books. The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and
Ham read much the same as “Well Met”.

Thought Block #3 –The places mentioned that might be in a collision course
with each other are somewhat extreme. The woman in the hotel room
scantily clad, to the church at St. Anne’s. In “A True Story, everything is
back and forth. “He is her salt and she his pepper”. The reference to
romance and war shows so much contrast, a person doesn’t know which
end is up. The woman’s getting older and the man’s getting younger. Which
way do we turn?

I think the gist of these stories says a lot about the world. There is
tremendous chaos and confusion, but there is also a lot of good in the
world and people who strive to do so. Yes, there are people who are
carefree and don’t really care what happens, but I also think maturity about
things comes with age. When you are young, you don’t really care or
understand ways of the world as much. Wisdom comes with age.
However, some people never grow up or gain the maturity expected of
them to be responsible adults and positive members of society.

BACKGROUND
Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/glassbook.mp3

If you're familiar with Valerie Fox's work, you know her work takes the reader to an intense, new world of associations, connections, and reconfigured perception.

Writing Assignment / Journal Based on Valerie Fox's The Glass Book

Step 1: Please respond to the following questions and observations. Let your thoughts flow, and do not worry about complete sentences or grammar. You may make lists and your thoughts can be fragmentary. The goal is to free-write, which may involve free association.

Thought-Block 1: In "They Know About Fish," what kinds of scenes and ideas come to mind? How might the work evoke notions of reality television or a documentary? What is the role of the viewer in making the fishermen authentic? What do the fishermen themselves do in shaping a notion of authenticity? What does authenticity mean to you in this situation? Write a few sentences about what it means to you to be authentic.

Thought-Block 2: Which prose poems make you feel as though you're watching a scene unfold? What are you, the viewer or reader, doing? How is your attention directed to specific elements of the scene? Does it make you seek to find a story to tie all the elements together? When do you first find yourself looking for a story to make sense of it all? What kind of stories seem to fit these poems? What did you expect to see? Investigate Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Thought-Block 3: List places where the characters in Fox's writing are in a collision course with each other. What will happen? What does the impending encounter reveal about each? What does it say about the world we live in? What are the locations they're in? What is the context? How does the fabric of reality hold up with all of this investigation into relations / places / encounters? Do you sense a strengthening of the people (or the places)? Or, an increasing fragility of the people? If you were to write a version about an encounter in an odd place in your life, what would it look like?

Step 2: Read your thoughts. Then, expand them. Revise and edit for clarity, but do not remove the vital spirit, the essence that flows forth. Then, share your thoughts on a blog, or turn them in as an assignment for a course.

Step 3: Create your own prose poem / writing. As you do so, visit the notion of "fu" -- the Han dynasty form of writing that blended poetry and prose. Here's a rather incomplete article on Chinese poetry, but a good starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_poetry

Ashley Jay: Response to Valerie Fox's The Glass Book

2011-01-10T05:44:00.001-06:00

Writing Assignment / Journal Based on Valerie Fox’s The Glass Book. Free pdf of the "lite" version; gorgeous printed version here.

Thought Block 1: "They Know About Fish"

Scenes of a small cold ocean side town, with lots of family owned storefronts. No big department stores, just the mom and pop stores. The town shuts down on Sunday. Everyone is trusting and believes there town is very safe. The way the towns’ people just flock to these men does bring to mind reality TV. It is liked the show “Punked”; these to men go in acting like they are something that they are not. Then in the end the truth comes out, however, they did not want it to. The viewer believes the men are telling the truth so they promote the fact that these men are really what they say. The “fishermen” go on telling stories about the sea and the fish they have caught. Telling stories is a great way to bring people in to the lies you are telling, the better the story the more people believe. Authenticity in this situation is explaining about fishing and being a fisherman. To be authentic in my opinion is to be true and honest. Just being you, whether that is being mean, nice, or in-between.

Thought Block 2: “The cornmeal ceiling, The furry couch”

This poem makes me feel like I am watching someone’s dream unfold. Its like I am watching from afar someone’s daydream, his or her subconscious is jumping all over the place. It is making for a very interesting story. The person starts out by worrying about another man and a child. Almost like he is self-conscious. Then it grabs my attention by the person being a rider on a greyhound bus. So that kind of explains why the person would be saying the comment about the other person and the child. Then it jumps to a nun, then a scarecrow in front of a seminary. It really jumps from subject to subject but the writer does a good job of in a subtle way to tie it all together. Toward the end I kind of was wondering of the cornmeal ceiling and the furry couch come into the mix. I envision the writer is speaking of himself or herself at the end of a long hard day. The cornmeal is the popcorn ceiling; the furry couch is where they have been perched at all day working hard. This poem goes with stories that are very image driven, that do not come out and say what they are saying, however the writer paints a picture as they go. Almost like Alfred Hitchcock shows. Alain Robbe-Grillet used imagery and repetition to drive his readers to the point he was trying to make. When reading his stories you really had to pay attention and study the subtle description of the story line. I find this kind of reading to be very interesting and enjoyable.

Though Block 3: Collision Course

In the first poem the fishermen are on a collision course with themselves. The truth of what they truly are, just plain outdoorsmen not fishermen at all. In the second poem the person is on a course with himself and the reality of the person they have become. In all the poems it seems that people are trying to find him or her or something. What will happen in the end, I think will be a mixture of good and bad. Some people will be happy and some will be sad. I think they are all in the location of searching for who and what they really are and want to be. Some of the encounters are positive and some are very threatening and scary. I think that the stronger people are sometimes the ones you have to watch out for. They may seem like the ones that have it all together, however, they are the ones that fall the hardest once left to do things alone. I sense an increasing fragility among people. With the finance strain that many Americans are facing it is easy to get depressed. It seems like every day you hear of someone losing their job, house, or something devastating happening to them and it is easy to just give up hope. If I were writing about and odd place in my life it would be about the constant change of a career and major in college choice. One day it is nursing, then teacher, then and hospital administration. The list goes on and I am at the point were I have to make a choice and I am scared to jump.

Step 3: a response

There is this girl she is 27

This girl needs to find her way

There our lots of paths this girl can take

This girl is at the point where she has to choose and take one

There is a lot of fear in this girl

This girl’s biggest fear is failure

There is only one way this girl will fail

That is by just sitting back and doing nothing

This girl will make a choice

There is no truning back for this girl

She has made her choice and will succeed with all she does.

Note: Ashley Jay's response to Valerie Fox's poetry / poetics was written in conjunction with an English Composition course at Florida State College Jacksonville / Fall 2010.

Mischief Afoot

2011-01-04T04:18:00.002-06:00

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/mischief.mp3

The newscaster announced that the Creek Nation's oldest living member had just died at age 110. She was born in 1900. Pretty amazing.

Question: How often are the "hyper-generians" not the person they claim to be? How often is it a much younger person who has assumed their identity?

I am always skeptical when I hear the 105-year-olds discuss their lives -- especially the ones who claimed the secret to their longevity is hard living -- drinking, smoking, gambling, eating pork fat, donuts, deep-fried American cheese? They could get the requisite skinniness through bouts of anorexia and bulimia. Why not consider at 75-year-old imposter? Even a 50-something pretending to be an 80-something?

I'm sure it's been attempted, especially if there are entitlement payments in the mix (pension, headrights, oil and gas revenue, etc.).

Where there's money, there's mischief afoot.

*******************************

If I were compelled to pretend to be a 110-year-old, what would I do?

First of all, I wouldn't do it. I would not pretend to be an 80-year-old, either. Not worth it. I don't want to have the conversations I'd be expected to have -- boring historical ramblings and an invented personal landscape. The alternative would be to feign dementia or Alzheimers. That would be a fragile defense against being exposed as an imposter. It would make me too vulnerable. Before I knew it, I'd wake up to find myself in danger of having my own identity snatched from me, and an imposter installed in my stead.

No thanks.

******************************

It's only tangentially related, but the idea of a person pretending to be a super-annuated citizen who has, in fact, passed away, in order to get her Social Security check, pension, and any other dividends or royalties that might be coming her way seems to have incalculable psychic consequences to the person who decides to shove their own identity and reality off to the side in favor of a secure income stream.

What ever happened to "to thine own self be true?"

I suppose the person who is willing to rebirth themselves is somehow dissatisfied with their personal reality.

Don't they realize it means they will never see their existing friends, family, and colleagues?

I guess it's considered the sweet end of the deal, if their life is really so bad that they must go down that path.

Perhaps they're old enough that they've lost everyone anyway and the person they're impersonating was their only remaining relative -- a mother, etc.

Who knows. Seems lonely, and not as regenerative or as materially secure as it might look to the person who is idly contemplating it.

**********************************

Which leads to My Ten New Year's Resolutions:

1. Be true to myself. Play more. Buy more toys. Translation: get involved in high-tech and very visionary educational / literary projects that challenge me on at least three or four levels.

2. Enjoy what I eat, and eat what I enjoy. Slow down, sit down, and don't wolf it down while standing up. I'm not a cow (yet).

3. Record more podcasts -- audio and video. Continue to interview e-learning innovators. Ask them to provide a video -- 2-minutes average time -- hosted on youtube, which I can embed.

4. Write a children's book. Do not center it around vampires, werewolves, zombies, luisons, or other undead, unless the publisher absolutely insists.

5. Set savings goals; reduce my overhead. Achieve the savings goals. (In other words, set them low).

6. Transform the workplace, make the world a better place. Think of solutions to hamster-wheel jobs and hamster-family workplaces. Do what I can to help people prepare themselves for jobs that have a chance of resulting in something. Who wants to think that their only thrill in life is seeing how many sunflower seeds they can pack into their cheek pouches? It is important to take the high road. Don't become a hamster mommy or daddy who emerges from its shredded Kleenex nest with a hunk of newborn hamster baby tail hanging from your mouth. Be nice to your co-workers, even if it is difficult. It's all about overcrowding and overpopulation. Why else would the hamster mommy or daddy eat its young, live spawn the very night they're born? Sometimes the cage is too small, the cube farm is too cheek-to-jowl and invasive. Help people spread out.

7. Warn the world of the danger of exotic pets. An African black mamba is not a good pet. Don't encourage genetic engineering and the development of such aberrations as glow-in-the-dark anacondas.

8. Watch more film noir.

9. Assume a relaxed, passive position when my loved ones are speaking to me. They will think I'm listening and have acquired (finally, after all these years!) an ability to hear what they're saying -- and-- more importantly -- accept it. I know in my heart of hearts that I have not (and cannot) acquire that ability. It's better to learn how to mentally multi-task. I can mentally rerun what I'm choreographing for fun dance routine, or visualize tennis and the serve I'm trying to learn.

10. Develop a new character to draw as I illustrate the children's book I intend to write.

Meta-Goal: Smile, chant, pray.

Pandora's Boxes, Escheatment, and a Stolen Wheel

2011-01-02T14:57:00.003-06:00

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/stolenwheel.mp3

Tanguely Frere emerged from the racquet club damp with sweat and ready to make the long drive across the dark city to her mid-town apartment where she planned to take a hot shower and to collapse into a soft bed with clean cotton sheets.

It was not to be.

As she approached her car, parked under a light and in view of the surveillance camera, she saw that the right rear end of her car resting on the ground. Someone had stolen her right rear wheel. Not the tire, but the entire wheel. There was a small pile of 5 lug-nuts on the ground.

It was the second time in two weeks that it had happened. The first time, Tanguely had interrupted the thieves, who sped off in a souped-up box of a car – an Element or something like it-- that sounded like a Harley Davidson with glasspacks. She did not realize what had been happening until the wheel started to come off as she drove down the road, heading toward Starbucks.

"At least the wheel did not come off while I was on the turnpike or in traffic," she said to the tow-truck driver.

They stole her wheel sometime before 9:15 at night on the shortest, darkest day of the year, which happened to coincide this year with a full eclipse of the moon, slated for around midnight.

"You were right." Tanguely texted her hair stylist who had become a mystic, soi-disant, with tarot cards and psychic visions. She wasn’t alone. Others were feeling the psychic groundswell, as late-night Coast-to-Coast radio interview subjects waxed eloquent on underground civilizations, reptilian aliens, Trilateral Commission meetings, Bohemian Grove, and 2012.

The eternal return of the apocalyptic narrative.

In the QuikTrip convenience store where Tanguely bought a coffee after airing up the spare tire, she noticed a bleached blonde woman with a chipmunk-like laugh that was so loud it echoed off the glass doors of the refrigerated SmartWater and sugar-free energy drinks. The woman was young, but with a laugh like that -- the result of being goofed up one whatever cheap stimulant around (meth? glue? shoe polish?) -- she would be wizened and toothless within three years. She could run around the trees with the other toothless chipmunks on crystal meth, thought Tanguely. Ordinarily, Tanguely felt a twinge of compassion for the drug abusers who seemed to gravitate to the convenience stores. Tonight, though, after having her wheel stolen, Tanguely felt hostility; raw aggression.

“I wonder how much they got for my wheel,” mused Tanguely. How long would it keep them high? They need to switch over to huffing gasoline. It’s cheap.

“Except they probably did it partially for the thrill,” commented Tanguely to no one in particular.

Someone was speaking Mexican-accented Spanish in a squeaky baby voice that someone had probably told her was "perky," and not simply annoying. She was showing her friend an engagement ring.

Tanguely paused by the door and punched the number in on her new iPhone which had a finicky touchscreen.

"You seem grumpy," commented her friend. Although it was pointless to call him, since he around 150 miles southeast of the racquet club.

"I am grumpy," said Tanguely. "I should be grateful. I know that. At least they took the whole wheel, and just one. It's better than having it fall off at 60 miles per hour."

Tanguely walked across the parking lot, and the sound of chipmunk laughter bounced up and down. Tanguely felt like turning around and running up to the chipmunk woman, recording her laugh and uploading it to iTunes.

That laugh would be perfect for horror films. You could play the laughter just before the knife came down in the shower, or the chainsaw appeared in Lovers Lane.

*******************

Tanguely walked through the door and opened her mail. She noticed a holiday card from the stock transfer company that had escheated 90,000 shares of stock she had inherited from her mother. The stock transfer company had claimed they had tried to establish contact with her. Unfortunately, the stock transfer company tended to deluge everyone on their mailing lists with spam and junk paper mail, to the point that whenever she saw an envelope with their return address, she expected a sales pitch for unneeded (but very expensive) workshops and third-party goods and services -- insurance, travel deals, even cosmetic surgery.

So, she didn't open her mail from them. She did not know she was not in contact. As a result she was turned over to the State of Colorado.

Getting her stock back once it had been escheated -- basically seized -- by the State of Colorado was harder than Tanguely ever imagined.

Now she was opening her holiday card.

It was a cute pop-up of gift boxes -- blue and purple. Undoubtedly, someone had thought they were nice little Hanukkah or Christmas gifts.

Pandora's boxes, thought Tanguely.

Beware the gifts proffered by a securities transfer company. Not Trojan horses, but worse. Open the box, open the present, and unleash pesky, needling, schadenfreude-ish energies of the night.

Was it the kind of energy that drove people to steal a wheel from a car in a racquet club parking lot? Did someone know she was inside, playing tennis on an indoor court?

"Doesn't your current boss live down the street from the racquet club?" asked her friend. "Doesn't he have a 16-year-old who just got a small SUV?"

"That looks like an Element?" responded Tanguely. She paused. "Yes."

Her friend sighed loudly. Tanguely spoke.

"I wasn't taking it personally until now," she said. "I guess I should. The police seemed to think it was an unusual event and that no one wants Subaru tires and wheels. If I had a Ferrari, yes. A 6-year-old Subaru? No."

She picked up the pop-up holiday card and peered inside the little pop-up boxes. Did they have gifts inside? The card was not elaborate enough for that.

*******************

The big questions:

How do we tell good from evil and right from wrong?

What is reality?

How do we know what we know?

Which professions are most ethical and which are the least ethical?

Why is being a circus clown a morally better choice than being an Olympic athlete?

Revenge fantasies flowed through Tanguely’s mind. How could she entrap the wheel thieves? It was not worth it.

Switching gears, Tanguely thought that the answers to the “big questions” were patently self-evident.

Therefore, they were not too interesting. She was more interested in the “nano-questions” – the subtle questions that left no “psychic footprint” to disrupt the flow…

“Morality does not unfold in a linear way,” commented Tanguely.

She assumed the thieves were young, male, with beliefs of impunity and immortality.

How about cornered rats? Desperate, angry, unwilling to conform?

Time for a few rat traps, of the human type, thought Tanguely.

And, well, rats were of any age.

It was sad.

Happy New Year.

Archetypal Energy Narratives: Low-Temperature Geothermal

2010-12-22T05:28:00.000-06:00

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/low-temp-geothermal.mp3

Is there are particular narrative that accompanies low-temperature geothermal resources? If so, what is the structure of the narrative? What are the underlying assumptions? What are implicit causal relationships? How does the narrative cohere?

Elements of the narrative:

1. The idea of low-temperature geothermal is a conundrum, an oxymoron, even.
2. Can relatively tepid water be used to generate energy? Where's the energy?
3. Changes in temperature and extreme thermal differences can trigger energy generation. How? There is equipment that will move (and start to generate electricity) when the temp diffs between two bodies of water are as little as 50 degrees.
4. The water is being produced anyway -- in conjunction with oil and gas. Typically, it's simply reinjected into a disposal / injection well. Why not capture the energy on its way back down into the earth?

Assumptions (to reinforce or to combat):

1. Low-temperature geothermal means something like tepid water, which is bad. (combat this faulty assumption)
2. Low temp means low energy. (combat this faulty assumption)
3. Fluids co-produced with oil and gas can be exploited / harvested / put to good use. (reinforce this positive assumption)
4. The co-produced energy is "clean" and "alternative" (since it is from warm water) and is a cleaner source of electricity than the oil or the gas. Virtue / value implications here. The geothermal elements can add virtue to a decidedly "unvirtuous" energy source, at least in today's view, if one views all oil and gas production as a source of carbon emissions.

Because the world tends to classify energy as "clean" or "dirty," and "good" or "bad," would it not follow that the narratives will only escalate over time? We'll have a good vs evil narrative -- clash of titans grand showdown. At least that's what the narrative expectations would lead one to expect.

Real-Life Intrusion
I'm in Starbucks right now and I'm amazed, as always, in the flows of crowds / customers. It's never an even stream. Either there is no line at all, or there is a long line. It's not just that people come in groups, it's that the groups cluster together. Five minutes ago there was no waiting. There was no activity for 5 minutes. In the last thirty seconds, 4 groups (clusters of two or more) and 3 individuals came in, for a total of around a dozen people in line. It's pretty amazing. I'm also amazed at the range of apparel options. It was cold last night -- 30 degrees or so -- and today is sunny. It is supposed to reach 50. Most people are wearing long-sleeve shirts, pants, jackets, or hoodies. But, here comes a guy in baggy shorts and a t-shirt. It's hard to understand! I wonder f crowd behavior is somehow determined by internal narratives; predictive of where people will be and when they should be there. There's an adorable pug sitting on the brick sidewalk on a pile of dried oak leaves. His leash is wrapped around a metal post, and he seems to be waiting quite patiently.

Back to Energy Narratives --

The more people classify items into good or bad, the more quickly they put themselves on a path to narrative inevitability.

"Narrative inevitability" has to do with a narrative that is so ingrained that if you have a story / tale / set of facts that gets anywhere close to it, the narrative will pull you in, drag you downstream, and right over the falls. Think of falling into the river that flows into Niagara Falls -- that is the pull of narrative inevitability. The only way to avoid it is to try to make sure your set of facts do not start shaping themselves so that they fall right into the stream of narrative inevitability.

Somewhere along the line, it's important to start reshaping your story so that it fits a different, competing narrative that fits your needs and purposes a bit more clearly / adeptly.

Good Girl Messages

2010-12-17T05:23:00.001-06:00

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/goodgirlmessages.mp3

The "Humanities" could play a reformative role in the social and political field.
Love has kinetic origins.
Replacing the word with oil & metal.
I used to read everything Julia Kristeva wrote in her marimba & bone mallet academic French;
Old medical school photos:
Seraphim and Cherubim made music on exalted vertabrae (scoliosis)
You are what you want to be --
all protest and grumbling inner voices that you claim you no longer hear;
The mask wears thin.
Stand up straight.
I've been there with you.
Photos c. 1901 of San Francisco opium dens.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
(Actually, there is, but who's willing to question?)
Tennis for good girls.
Sports, poetics, listen closely.
The generation that ruined everything.
Stand up.
So they say, so --
Everyone ruined everything.
Everything and everyone breeds.
Faces for good girls.
The most successful are the most destructive.
Why is it always so? Flourish to the point of extinction.
Joy. Love. Happiness. Prosperity.
Unsustainable.
Humans have no fur.
What will we do or say?
Did you see the holiday traffic in front of the big box stores this weekend?
Thanksgiving and the origins of paper money.
Blueprints of the absolute:

Love

& the internal combustion engine.

Memory Is a Problem: Perfume, "Our Song," and the Shifting Sands of Embedded Narratives

2010-12-15T11:58:00.005-06:00

Podcast. http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/false-memory.mp3

Jimi Hendrix. Voodoo Chile. Is it heresy to say that this song does nothing for me? Sure, I understand the greatness, the individual talent, the spiraling pass that makes it all the way to the endzone of a bliss that has appropriated and/or bowdlerized Romanticism all over it.

I'm only listening to the recording because I have no choice. I'm in a gritty, Bohemian restaurant that has a raw veggie wrap I like.

Long term memory is not static. Even autobiographical memory is dynamic, subject to change. I'm not sure if that means that one's ability to recall is variable, or if the memories themselves are variable.

Okay. I sort of like "All Along the Watchtower" and "Hey Joe." I have no idea what they're about. To me, Jimi Hendrix died when he was about 50. Of course he didn't. He was 27. But, his work has been around so long, it seems as though he's alive -- along with his music. I guess he'd be around 70 if he were alive today, perhaps as boring "pillar of the financial community" as Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger have become.

I'm intrigued. The implications of a protean, constantly morphing memory are fascinating.

Jimi Hendrix has now moved into "Easy Rider." I can't remember who did this song. I don't much care for it.

I'm at a table next to a window partially covered by a poster advertising a New Year's celebration. Two men have just walked by -- one is pushing a shopping cart with clothing and other possessions. They both have long brown beards. No gray. Does that mean they're in their 20s or 30s? For some reason, I always think of the homeless as being old, but the truth is, they're generally not.

I remember having contact with homeless in Oklahoma City. The parking lot I used was next to a detox center, and men would regularly ask for a dollar or sometimes odd amounts -- 15 cents. In New York City, the panhandlers were not homeless, nor were they in Baku or in St. Petersburg, Russia. Instead, they seemed a bit like carnies -- and very well rehearsed and organized.

One Sunday morning two years into the Iraq war, while visiting friends in Philadelphia, I came across a ragged young man who was leaning against a brick wall somewhere off Rittenhouse Square. For some reason, I felt compelled to give him a ten-dollar bill. I think I was influenced by my time in Azerbaijan -- it was fairly normal for people to stop and give money to people who were on the street corners who asked for help. I respect the generosity of the individuals who give out individual charity. There's something about the panhandlers here in Tulsa, though, that takes me aback. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that some are given to saying aggressive things, and to demand a cigarette.

Can I trust any of my memories?

I believe I can. But, one has to say that it could be that emotional connections to the memory could mediate it.

Some sort of seventies anthem is blaring across the speakers. It is equally repellant. Why do I dislike "Classic Rock"? Does it have to do with the associated memories?

Most people would say so. The would claim that the popularity of "greatest hits" compilations has to do with the fact that they trigger memories of one's pleasant times, formative years. Music is like perfume, in their eyes. It triggers deep memories that you can't expunge, even if you want to. So, what you do is find the music that has the most pleasant cluster of associative and associated memories and then you replay, replay, replay.

Good idea?

If memories are pliable and/or shape-shifting, doesn't it follow that every time you hear a song in a new context, the experience of listening to the song is mediated? Further, does it not follow that the emotional impact would also change? Then, your memory goes awry.

Concrete example: If I first listened to Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Child" as a child in conjunction with confusing, rather menacing images and energies, would that always be with me? Would my experience change if I started to associate the song with exciting times in the summer -- sitting outside eating dinner with friends, drinking coffee at a bohemian java bar?

Another song, some sort of ditty that is a clear borrowing from an Irish folk tune: "hello mr blue sky -- welcome to the human race." Elton John admitted to having raided the Methodist hymnal for chord progressions and even melodies.

Memory turns into a self-delusion machine if we're not careful.

So, if we have associated memories -- what are they associated with? The updated melody? The original? The variations that came later?

Rolling Stones: Honky Tonk Woman. My memories associated with this song are of my older cousin from Vermont who came to spend a summer with us in Oklahoma. In my view, her presence was quite unwelcome. She occupied my bedroom. Her main goal was to go back bronzed and glamorous. This was before tanning beds -- and -- before she had experienced anything but a Northern sun oon her white, freckled hide.

The Oklahoma August sun did quick work of her, and when I think of her, I think of her listening to the Rolling Stones, then baking in the backyard on my mom's favorite chaise longue. Later, she burned to a crisp, or at least a blistering ball of pain. Second-degree burns. I felt nothing but schadenfreude at the time (I was 6 years old). Later, I got mine -- not realizing why the beaches of the Yucatan peninsula were empty at noon in March during Spring Break. I, a 16-year-old who should have known better, got so sunburned the tops of my toes peeled.

Memory is fallible. That's been demonstrated over and over again. It is remarkably easy to induce false memories as well. Why do I think I'm immune to it?

Perhaps "greatest hits" and perfume are reassuring simply because we rely on them as memory markers. They trigger memories -- authentic ones, we suppose -- and we rely on them to access a kind of "write-protected" part of our brains.

But, apparently, nothing is "write-protected" and your memories can be altered without any sort of physiological issue. So, there is nothing to say that my memories of my cousin and her taste for the Rolling Stones and the popular television shows of the day that featured teenagers in go-go boots and "mod" Herman's Hermits and the like have not been effaced or attenuated by my emotional need for a certain narrative to be associated with those days or times.

This seems fairly straightforward.

What is not so straight-forward is how I'm supposed to move forward in a world where everything is fluid and where everything reinvents itself, and not necessarily in a way that benefits me.

The other day, I was listening to a program on the radio -- the name of show was something like "Radio Lab" (see how I distrust my memory for my invented schema and the labels and short-hand retrieval, but I trust my memory implicitly for the narrative). It was the story of a woman who dated a man with face-recognition disorder. Coincidentally, the week before, there was a story about a professor who had face recognition disorder. They could not remember nor could they recognize faces. They would have intense difficulty in life because everyone was, in essence, a stranger to them. I suppose the pattern recognition part of their brains were sadly compromised.

I had a few questions for them. Could they read maps? Could they recognize where they were on a map? If face recognition disorder was anything like the problems I had in field camp trying to see in 3D with stereo pairs -- well, I can understand the frustration. When it came to verbal recognition / description of lithologies, I was completely on top of it. To me, geology was a language and a discourse of explanation. My brain is comfortable with that. My brain is not comfortable with making my vision go to 3D and/or contorting spatial relationships in order to make some sort of visual pattern. My brain is all about process analysis and language. I'm not saying that I can't recognize visual patterns, it's just that I think of the maps we were supposed to use back in the 80s required too much visual extrapolation. For me, it was like using a slide rule rather than a calculator; or, better yet, using an abacus instead of a computer.

I'm acting as though the most important aspect of memory is autobiographical memory, and I have to say that I'm uncomfortable with that thought.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of memory for me has to do with working memory - the place where short term memory and long-term memory have contact. How much of working memory is impacted by the limbic system -- raw, unmediated urge -- fight, flight, fornicate, feed. And, how much of working memory is affected by desire?

I have a feeling that desire plays a very disturbing role in the function of the brain, particularly when it comes to the retrieval of long term memories, and also the way that connections are made between prior knowledge, experience, and schema. I have a feeling that desire can re-route memories and make false priorities, which is to say that it make certain memories rise to the top, while leaving others to hover along the bottom along with the other catfish.

I also suspect that if one does not learn to discipline one's own desire, one is fated to be stuck in fantasy mode-- and eventually, one's memories will be only accessible through one well-trodden and very boring working memory road -- and you'll end up remembering only those things that make you feel good.

Hmmm -- does that sound like anyone you know?

I have a friend who has a favorite refrain -- everything was better in the 50s. He was born in 1949, so I really question what sorts of authentic memories he has. He claims to have a very in-depth recall of the economic downturn of 1958 (or one of those years). I do not doubt him; what I see is a convergence of belief, desire, and emotional conflict (a recognized state of innocence mixed with an anger at the loss of innocence). So, in the end, what is emitted, with clocklike precision, is a rant about how wonderful and innocent those times were, yet how disappointing and hard -- but the narrative that emerges from that uncomfortable juxtaposition is one that he invariably blends with a narrative of the Pilgrim's first winter, how honorable, pure, and heroic they were. I start to think how ultimately sacrificial memory and consciousness itself are.

And, well, while he never says it straight out in that way, but I will.

Memory and consciousness are sacrificial.

So, here I am -- writing this, surrounded again by music, but I'm in a different location -- one that is warm in the way that an Art Deco boutique hotel can be warm. You feel transported back to a time when you can feel comforted by the solid clink of gold in your pocket and oil under your feet.

The music is different. Karen Carpenter is singing "Merry Christmas, Darling" in a way that brings tears to one's eyes-- it's intimate and sentimental -- what her contemporaries would have called "square" --

and, well, being the "square" person that I am - (emotional and idealistic in a way that seeks approval from authority figures, rather than rejecting the approval of authority figures) -- I'm moved. I immediately think of my mother, and I'm sad that I can't call her and talk to her.

Perhaps I will, even though she's not in a place where she can easily answer.

How many people dial up and talk to their dear, departed mothers?

Ah, yes. I'm starting to go down that road of memory mediated by desire.

I'm not sure I'm brave enough right now for that journey. So, I'll stay on the surface and remind myself how much I dislike the "Classic Rock" stations and the way that people cluster songs around certain time markers.

Notes from Veracruz

2010-12-13T17:34:00.000-06:00

podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/veracruz.mp3

So many things are simply a matter of point of view -- in Veracruz, the Plaza of the Heroes commemorates the valiant defense by the Mexican naval forces against four different invasions. Two were invasions by the U.S. -- one in 1847 -- during the Mexican-American War. That one did not surprise me.

The other invasion by the U.S. was in 1914.

1914??

That event never quite made it to the history books I studied in high school and college. It does not seem to make it to even the most politically inclusive undergraduate history texts (U.S. History after the Civil War). This I know because I've worked extensively in developing instructional materials -- overviews, lectures, quizzes, and podcast scripts -- for U.S. and world history textbooks.

I never saw any mention of the 1914 invasion by the U.S., although there is often mention of the U.S. military's meddling (or "helping") in political and economic affairs in Central America.
I will say that, if anything, the textbooks focus on the U.S. desire to maintain an isolationist stance during that time. However, I am not sure how that squares with the Spanish-American War (of 1898).

Times and attitudes change quickly, I suppose, and life in 1898 was different than U.S. daily life in 1914. Americans did not want to get into the "Great War" any more than they welcomed the enthusiastic rabble-rousers Emma Goldman and other anarchists.

Americans defend life, liberty, and justice for all.

That's the goal, at least, and it's the utopian side of a coin with two faces. Heads or tails? Liberators or invaders? Which do you prefer?

Narratives of Maturation: The Bildungsroman vs. Thermal Maturation of Hydrocarbons

2010-12-08T06:31:00.002-06:00

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/maturation.mp3

How is the concept of thermal maturation of hydrocarbons in shales similar / not similar to a Bildungsroman?

Can the narrative employed to explain the process of thermal maturation, together with all its attendant assumptions, be applied to fiction? Or, to biographical narratives?

It would be easy to say that this is simply an exercise in tracking analogies. I think that it can be more than that. What we can examine are the underlying assumptions that inform human maturation, and geochemical maturation. We can also look at which we privilege -- do we give preferential treatment to the process? Or, the qualities that accompany each stage? What do we consider to be the triggering factors? What are the elements that are necessary for maturation? Because the Bildungroman is such a well-known narrative form, and such a well-trod genre, it is not a bad idea to start with the narrative of thermal maturation, in a rather skeletal form.

Thermal maturation:

The "immature" state is a shale that contains a high carbon content. Kerogen is a mixture of organic chemical compounds that make up a portion of the organic matter in sedimentary rocks.

Typically, it's an organic-rich shale. "Immature" signifies that the shale is in a relatively untransformed state. It is shale. Nothing has broken free from it -- and, the chemical that can eventually transform to hydrocarbon (methane to the more complex alkanes) has not yet undergone pyrolysis, etc.

Value judgment: "Immature" is valueless, except in its function as a "seal" over a porous rock that functions as a sponge -- it holds liquids (like oil) -- and the seal creates a trap for the oil.

Process is everything, especially when it involves trial by fire: How does natural gas emerge from carbon-rich shale? The key is maturation.

What kind of maturation? It's thermal. In other words, the temperatures must ascend to the point that the shale breaks down, physically and chemically -- it starts to become more fissile, have fractures (which function as conduits for the newly formed gas). The shale starts to change chemically -- the kerogen transforms, and starts to break down.

This sounds very straightforward until you realize that that triggering mechanism -- heat flow -- has to be at an ideal rate. Otherwise, metamorphosis takes place and the shale transforms into hard, non-hydrocarbon bearing metamorphic rock such as slate.

If the heat flow happens too quickly and intensely, any hydrocarbons that might have started to form combust. They burn off. They're simply gone.

If the heat flow is too mild, and the rate of heating is too slow, there may be a bit of in-situ methane, but not in commercial quantities, and it will be hard to recover because it's possible that fractures did not form.
　
Application to literary narratives:

1. Maturation requires a triggering event, and the event is never pleasant.

2. Heat is part of the equation -- not a low heat, or a fiery flash-point sort of flame-out. It takes time. It's slow-cooked. The heat is constant and it lasts a long time.

3. Application of heat (discomfort) has to be constant and continuous. Episodic heat, as well as episodic tectonic activity (movement of the earth) -- both are necessary in order to liberate the gas and to create rocks that have fractures through which the gas can move.

4. Too much or too little will result in a failure to mature correctly -- too much heat means a destruction of the organics. Too little means that nothing happens -- just a seemingly endless stasis. Paralysis -- emotional, physical, psychological.

Underlying parallels -

The Bildungsroman looks ahead to the end-point -- the making of the writer / artist, and at formative events.

The assumption that maturation is a process.

The assumption that maturation is linear and not reversible.

These are a few thoughts -- more to come.

Day After Thanksgiving

2010-12-03T05:25:00.000-06:00

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/dayafterthanksgiving.mp3

It's the day after Thanksgiving, and my dad and I went to the cemetery south of Noble off highway 77 where my mom is buried. I didn't want to go empty-handed, so I suggested bringing silk flowers. My dad had already donated all my silk lilies to the church, so that was not successful. We ended up going into the back yard to my mother's favorite rose bushes and cutting off three yellow roses and one red rose. We put them in a vase, which we brought with us.

The goal was to try to decide on a headstone. What dimensions? What color? What kind of design?

As we stood at my mother's grave, a woman drove up with a clutch of red and white silk poinsettias. She took out the yellow and orange chrysanthemums and replaced them with the red and white blooms.

"It's funny. Since my husband died, I don't decorate for Thanksgiving or Christmas. He was all about it. But, well, I don't know."

She placed the Thanksgiving chrysanthemums on the ground. "If they still look good, I like to share them with little Roger over there," she said. "He never has anything on his grave."

To tell the truth it was the first time since my mother passed away that I had brought anything out. It did seem very sad to see her grave -- no marker, except for the little temporary marker with a photo taken years before. The dirt was compacted with mud cracks and a couple of thick tire tracks. I blocked the intrusive thoughts that started to push their way in.

"It's tough," I said. "It brings back too many memories."

I invariably thought of my grandmother during Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. My grandmother made a few things for Thanksgiving that seemed to be fairly unique -- fruit and nut salad, and, if I remember correctly, pistachio jello. Lemon merengue pie was also a "must," with the most amazingly fluffy merengue.

Cooking is chemistry.

The day was not warm, but nor was it inordinately chilly. The cemetery had a remarkably warm, soothing feeling, due in part that it was bordered on three sides by pastures and a couple of herds of tranquil looking Black Angus.

At least 60 percent of the headstones had flowers or other decorations. There were a few flags, and one seemed to have an assortment of toys.

I was surprised to see how many names I recognized -- one was the assistant branch manager for the bank I have used for the last 20 years. Her husband was buried just three rows up from my mother. Her name was next to that of her husband, along with the dates of their marriage. He passed away in 2005 -- I remember her telling me about it, and how tragic his last few weeks were, with complications from chemotherapy. Five years ago.

Can she ever remarry? Does it seem odd that she would be buried next to her previous husband? I guess not -- I mean, I know they had at least a daughter together, and at least one grandchild.

I'll definitely bring something for my mother's grave sometime before Christmas.

Narrative Inevitability

2010-11-29T19:50:00.002-06:00

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/narrative-inevitability.mp3

When confession is around the corner, the nightmares suddenly cease;
"no one is given more than they can endure" reassurrance; despite
the mask, the tape, the skin-sizzle in the distance;
tell it to the team tasked with torturing out the "truth."

Align the presentation of details, facts, figures
the narrative builts itself; bank on
narrative ineluctability; the interrogator makes the meaning
the interrogated simply blurts out enough to stop the pain

Please keep in mind we're not talking about physical torture now
I just wanted that to be absolutely lead-crystal bell-tone clear

Stem cell my heart moving ahead rail-speed highs
and lows; aren't you where I expected you to be?
cure the reprogrammed memory; aren't you where you should be?
Let me put my eye on the sky; particles blinders the inner healers

Somewhere and somehow you started to sound like Rapunzel;
Climb golden up indifferent yet walls still barren solid
Suffer the body, suffer the sane. We are all tissues of inevitability;
tell me the story; damaged like all the hard to reach, hard to hold.

Please keep in mind we're in the midst of the occasional;
and I'm in the midst of mind, heart & storms -- still random.

The Eternal Zunshine of the Spotless Mind: Zunshine Meets Burke Meets Zygotsky -- Mashup or Meltdown?

2010-11-27T17:14:00.000-06:00

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/zunshine.mp3

I'm interested in how Lisa Zunshine's cognitive recognition in literature // application of Theory of Mind relates to Kenneth Burke's consubstantiality (getting under the skin of the reader).

Don't both have to do with extreme identification with the discourse? It could be either the speaker or the protagonist -- the rhetor or the literary character.

Here is one difference:

Kenneth Burke is writing from a point of view of rhetoric, which is to say that he's concerned with the rhetor's tactics, and the impact on the reader. It falls under the umbrella of persuasive discourse.

Lisa Zunshine, however, is writing from the point of view of literary discourse; in particular, the novel and the characters that inhabit it. For her, the great appeal of literature is the fact that the reader is able to derive voyeuristic pleasure by vicariously living a narrative that has appeal to the reader. For Zunshine, we know what will happen in a text not only because we are familiar with certain archetypal narratives that repeat themselves in history, and we know the patterns, but we know what we know because of our learned abilities for "mind-reading."

Zunshine turns to cognitive science to explain the mind learns patterns and is rewarded and reinforced. Her view is largely complementary to that of Vygotsky, who supports a theory of social learning, to wit: children learn from each other, and learning is one aspect of socialization.

Thus, it is largely a constructivist view of reality / knowledge. The Theory of Mind that Zunshine adheres to seems to suggest that there are some patterns that are innate to the human brain and are not necessary encoded through social interaction. What clearly differentiates Zunshine from Vygotsky is Zunshine's focus on the emotional engagement of the reader, who uses his or her ability to predict behavior based on cues / patterns to derive pleasure; often sadistic.

In contrast, Burke's vision seems platonic, and focused on a kind of neo-platonic moment of unity, where empathic responses to text inform the decisions (and hence, attitudes and actions) of the reader.

In The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (dir. Michel Gundry, 2004), the narrative posits a world where Theory of Mind concepts are suspended; as a person goes through a process of deep-cleaning the mind of pesky / abhorrent memories, it effectively wipes clean the mind of any emotional memory. One might, by extension, assume that the individuals who have been cleansed would, by necessity, also lose their emotional intelligence, their socially-learned / imprinted knowledge. They would be wiped clean of Vygotsky-type experientially- and socially-learned knowledge.

Would they be wiped clean of consubstantiality? Perhaps not. If the rhetor can find points of contact // shared reference points, ideally emotional -- it's possible for the individuals to relate through text.

Now for the knotty problem.

Would wiping one's memory of emotional entanglements and relationships (past loves) affect one's ability to predict the actions and emotional states of fictional characters?

If we do indeed have a hard-wired, innate set of patterns in our minds that compel all people from all cultures to behave in certain highly predictable ways, and to have the same emotional responses, perhaps.

However, if the deep-cleaning materially affects the physical wiring, all bets are off. Any damage to the brain itself would affect anything that is there, whether acquired through experiential learning, socialization, or through pattern recognition acquisition.

WORKS REFERRED TO IN THE TEXT

The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (dir. Michel Gundry, 2004). Film.

Burke, Kenneth. (1969) A Rhetoric of Motives. U of California P.

Vygotsky, Lev. (1986). Thought and Language. Boston: MIT Press.

Zunshine, Lisa. (2006). Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Ohio UP.

The Glass Book: Writings by Valerie Fox -- free "lite" ebook

2010-11-21T07:45:00.013-06:00

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/glassbook.mp3

If you're familiar with Valerie Fox's work, you know her work takes the reader to an intense, new world of associations, connections, and reconfigured perception.

The Glass Book: http://www.zenzebra.net/fox/glassbook-lite.pdf

Writing Assignment / Journal Based on Valerie Fox's The Glass Book

All Saint's Day

2010-11-17T09:02:00.000-06:00

http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/allsaints.mp3

It appears my dad and I are in the same stage of grief / grieving. I claim my mother communicates with me by sending me butterflies and rainbows whenever she wants to indicate to me that I'm doing the right things to take care of myself. My dad says he and my mom, due to their long marriage, started to share the same frequency, energy charge, and that they communicate via energy vibrations. She's in the stars. Her energy, though, being the same as my dad's, resonates.

"Do you have a Bible in your apartment?" asked my dad. "Turn to 1st Peter, chapter 3." I read it. It exhorted women to obey their husbands; husbands to be kind to their wives.

"Your sister should read that," he said.

I took the bait.

"Have you ever stroked a cat's fur against the grain? Stroked it backwards?" I paused, smiled. "The cat takes a bite of your arm."

I set the alarm for 5 am. I woke up minutes before that. However, I changed my mind about it -- did not want to get out of my warm, soft bed. I fell back asleep.

The sky burst open. Dreams before awakening -- traveling on a regional jet and looking down. Flying / running higher and higher. Then, I was in a helicopter -- a jet helicopter -- looking ahead to a bank of clouds we were getting ready to enter. I watched a small plane pull a plane that looked like a dump truck with wings, and we soared over a city with skyscrapers and a sinuous river.

But where were we headed? I had no idea. No thoughts about final destination. Get right with your maker. Where am I going? Ascending vertically, circling, spiraling up and down, clinging to a mini laptop. Butterflies in my stomach. Dizzy.

I'm getting ready to meet people I've been out of contact with for a long, long time. And now I'm descending into 19th-century Mexico for Dia de los Muertos celebration and a ragged copy of sonnets by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a translation of R.D. Laing's The Divided Self, and a dog-eared edition of Octavio Paz's El Laberinto de la Soledad. The Mexico he understood was deeply chasmed, and so are we all, split by life.

It's All Saints Day.

Bread Pudding

2010-11-13T03:56:00.000-06:00

http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/breadpudding.mp3

This bread pudding -- a specialty of the baguette shop I like to frequent here in Norman -- has the kind of gluey density reminiscient of rubber cement that makes me think that it's the perfect accompaniment to a multivitamin pill and a couple of calcium supplements -- the things that tend to make me nauseous unless I'm taking them on a full stomach. If they make me nauseous, can vitamin and calcium supplements really be so good for me? My body seems to tell me "no" but all the doctors say "yes."

My dad proudly shows me the begonias he's nurtured to a showy, bright fuschia and red in the front flowerbed.

"They were spindly and would not bud out with flowers until I started giving them shots of Miracle Gro."

Am I so different from a begonia? When I was in high school, I offered to do an experiment on "the effect of chemicals on begonias" -- inspired, perhaps, by "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds." That was the title of a play I read in 10th grade. Not surprisingly, it had less to do botanical experimentation and more to do with a couple of daughters dealing with their mom in an almost impossible home situation. I've always found the title to be a particularly poignant metonymy, and I tear up a bit every time I think of it.

"The Effects of Miracle Gro on Begonias" (I don't know what variety the begonias are -- I'm sure it's a colorful name, although not much can match "Man in the Moon Marigolds." Here are a few ideas -- "Dad's Home Pride," "Strength-in-Numbers." Both have a nice metonymic ring, too. And, speaking of metaphors and the desire to generate figurative language, I leafed through the PMLA today (Proceedings of the Modern Language Society), and for the first time in my life, I had a desire to go to the annual conference, which takes place in Los Angeles this year. I do not want to go there for the job interviews, although that's always the big draw -- it's the place where modern language professors and new grads go to interview for positions. I actually felt a desire to check out some of the presentations. I've made a stab at keeping up with my publications -- articles, chapters, etc. in peer-reviewed journals. But, they're in instructional design and not scholarship on a period, writer, movement, or theoretical stance.

In fact, I don't even know who the latest, biggest, hottest new theorists are... all I know is that I was getting quite tired of the theoretical scene in the late 1990s because it seemed so cut-and-dried, and so "cart before the horse," which is to say that a large, glaring theoretical synthetic a priori / set of prior assumptions assured that no matter what went into the critical blender, the same gelatinous pulp would glop out of the spigot. The only question was how much you'd get, and what temperature it might be. It ranged from tepid to room temp, in case you happened to wonder.

Bread pudding. I'm taking another bite. This bread pudding has the requisite base of stale croissants and day-old baguettes (and maybe even a bagel or two), but in the mix, they've swirled in shredded coconut, some sort of oil (canola?), raisins, and cinnamon / cardomom, etc. Over the top is what used to be rum syrup, but what I'm convinced is plain old corn syrup with a bit of Torino rum flavoring mixed in. It's bland. I'm glad it's bland. Otherwise, I might go a little crazy and eat the whole thing. As it is, I'm thinking I can eat a portion, then run out to the car where I have some Flintstones chewable multivitamins in an overnight bag in the trunk. I may opt out of the vitamins, though. Despite the fruity kid flavors, they have a yukky aftertaste.

It's time to pop over to my hair appointment which is conveniently located in a salon a few doors down from the baguette shop.

She's running behind. So, to kill time, I've decided to chat with the painter who is touching up the "La Belle Vie" sign -- my gambit is, "Que tipo de pintura?" (What kind of paint?) To which he replies, "Aceite" (oil-based).

So, I have my perfect opening to start chatting about paint, and how wet paint looks lighter than dry paint, and how one has to be careful when selecting colors. He's from Jalisco. I chat a bit, then thank him for letting me bother him as he works, as my stylist works through appointments. I should ask her for some "miracle gro" for my hair, but it's sort of the last thing I want, since my hair, like my imagination, grows much too quickly. I've always liked the convergence of philosophy and literary exegesis. I like new tactics for getting meaning(s) to pop out from a text. I also like the connections between science and literature.

Mathematics.The mathematical literary imagination. In the 80s and 90s, it was all randomness and fractals. Today, it's all neural networking, imaging, patterns -- extrapolations. Is this advisable for humanistic endeavors? Take literature, search for patterns in an extreme way (J. Hillis Miller & Co on steroids) and then claim the images are the reality? That there is a measurable reality behind the "best fit" model? Not good. Or, perhaps it is good.

Bread pudding. It's tasty, and, in a pinch, I'll bet you could use it as modelling clay.

Facing the Wind

2010-11-09T03:54:00.001-06:00

http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/wind.mp3

The only obstetrician in the small Texas town admitted five women in five hours to the local hospital. Each had a different threat to her pregnancy. Will the hospital run out of beds? It's possible, someone said. We did not smile.

It is unusual to have so many obstetric emergencies at the same time. Is it a full moon? Sun spots?

My first thought was that it was from the smell scraped off the surfaces of the slaughterhouse north of town. Someone said they installed low-water systems for conservation, to go "green." Doesn't low water mean it's harder to hose off all the blood? I admit I've never seen the inside of a slaughterhouse / packing plant, so I have no idea how they use water. Do they have high-pressure hoses? I'm all for green.

The wind is blowing. I have to tell you it is not necessarily a good thing. However, I want to face the wind whenever I have to, and I want to look at it -- even when it's cold and frustrating -- as a blessing and a life-giving force. The wind turns the turbines on the south edge of town. Yes, I'm in northwest Texas, again, in the Panhandle nirvana of the essential elements: earth, wind, and the fiery sun....

Naoya Shiga: A Dark Night's Passing. The orphaned boy met his grandfather, who held his fate in his hand. The boy was six years old. To him, the old man looked thin and cruel. Taking an instant dislike to one's imposed patriarch does not strike me as wrong.

I'd like to have a nice, long talk to figure out what went wrong (and what goes right).

But, we'd probably go in circles. At least, that's what I do. I approach the truth, or at least an essential, unchanging element, and suddenly, I'm a bead of mercury and I deflect myself, or I shatter into a thousand tiny globules. Eventually, I reconverge with my brother and sister globules, and I'm a big bead of mercury all over again - just with a small film of dust on the top.

By the way, it's surprising how we used to play with mercury -- how we did not know the risks, in spite of Mad Hatters and birth defects in the old gold towns in Nevada and California, where they used cinnabar (mercury sulfide) to dissolve the gold from the ore. My mother disinfected my wounds with white merthiolate -- it did not sting like the red stuff. Both had a base of mercury.

I scraped myself often in those barefoot summers of running across lawns, down the street, and into the neighbors' splash ponds, fountains, and pools. We converged to play, tiny globules who would soon forget what it was like to be a zippy little bead of light and inexplicable chemical.

Stepping Stone

2010-11-05T08:36:00.001-05:00

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/steppingstone.mp3

We look at our lives. We think we're at the beginning or at the ending of something, but in reality we're not. We're simply on stepping stones in the middle of a rushing stream.

The rocks are smooth and they are slippery. We can't maintain our balance on them and stay on them, even though we'd like to. After all, it's scary to jump from one rock to another. The water is cold, and it is turbulent. The water level rises and falls, making it also a matter of exigency that we leap - preferably before we've had too much time to over-analyze the situation and lose our initial, intuitive understanding.

Oh but it's not easy. As much as I celebrate the successful leap and landing on a new rock, I am sometimes weary of the constant readjustment, realignment, reassessment. The water is rising again. It is time for action again. I look (but only briefly) at the rocks behind me. It's not good to look back, because there's a certain introduced disequilibrium in the physical act of looking back -- not to mention the fact that the mind starts to play tricks on me, and I lose my sense of linear time.

The rock I'm on is pointed and it hurts my left foot. Three stones ago, I perched for quite awhile on a long, smooth stone. I now appreciate it, but at the time, I felt the stepping stone I was on was too big -- I was too exposed -- I felt vulnerable. The waters started to rise and I leapt.

Then I leapt again, again, and again. So, here I am now.

The air smells fresh today. It's a bit foggy, and I hear the hum of cicadas and a strange bullfrog twanging -- it sounds like large rubber bands being snapped.

This is not the best place to be, but I've made it work -- for as long as I've been here. The sun is coming out. The fog is burning off. Ah yes, and there's a mini-rainbow in the mist.

Catty Wonky iiii

2010-11-03T03:49:00.004-05:00

http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/cattywonky.mp3

It may have been her imagination, but Sarah noticed her hair seemed to be becoming finer, more fly-away. She also noticed that she was able to maintain muscle tone - to even look slightly ripped -- while spending almost no time at all lifting weights. The most she did any more for her upper body was to close the door to her office when she was feeling groggy after lunch, and do 10 sets of 10 pushups against the edge of her cheap and grotesquely heavy veneer-over-particle board office desk.

She always had the sense that her life was interchangeable with a Hal Hartley film. She lifted the book she had bought because it was cheaper than a 10-pound dumbbell, and it gave her nice definition in her deltoids.

As she watched her muscles flex in the mirror, she wondered if she could find the email addresses of the editors of the weighty tome she had in her hand -- the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. She would like to express her appreciation of their catholic, all-inclusive view of the world. Her leg hair was definitely thinning these days. She could go weeks without mowing her legs and they looked just fine.

For fun, and to see if her muscles bulged, she did a yoga pose -- the anjaneyasana pose -- a forward lunge with arms in the air. Whenever she did yoga, it had a very oddly familiar feeling about it, perhaps because when she was in junior high school, the warmups and cool downs after dodge ball or some other humiliating "team" (read "gang up on the weird kid") sport, were meditative yoga poses and asanas.

Yoga was a good thing.

It helped her ignore it when she was duped yet again by a too-friendly face asking her overly solicitous questions -- which she answered in good faith until somewhere along the line she realized she was being mocked, not interviewed. She was their entertainment, their sport, their way to feel still in control and on top of the world. (sigh)

If her hair really was fining, and if it were due to some odd shift in her hormone production, should she feel awkward about the change?

She liked the word "transmogrify" -- it had the convenience of meaning to change shape, but "transmogrify" also had the sound "ogre" embodied in it, which is exactly how she felt of the time these days. Perhaps she should live under a bridge. Menace billy goats who happened to clippety-clap over the bridge. The nice, ripped body would be nicer if she had someone to share it with. But, who had time?

Her favorite Hal Hartley film was Henry Fool -- about two people -- a garbage collector poet and a hack writer -- and the unexpected encomiums that result when work gets out, goes viral...

She used to care about having work go viral, but the only was she could get her youtube videos to go viral was to do reaction videos from the highest-ranked videos of the day and put in all the same tags; and then not care when all the scathing insults came through when people fell for the bait and switch. Her best viral video was a reaction video to the news of a Siberian tiger mauling a zoo patron.

Today there was Great White Shark attack in California. A surfer's entire leg was detached in a single, ghastly, scary movement of jaws and razor-sharp serrated teeth. How? Why? Let's look. A shark 20 feet long can exert a bite force of over 18,000 newtons (4,000 lbf).

In Hal Hartley's sequel to Henry Fool, the garbage collector's wife, Fay Grim, finds herself in an odd situation. The camera angles reinforce the oddness -- they incorporate "Dutch angles" -- in common terms, the camera is all catty-wonky ... it's in the wrong direction. In theory, the filmmakers had a reason for it. She could not figure it out. Don't be afraid of your geography. She went to the Dollar Tree store to load up on 5 dollar movie candy selling there for a buck a pop. Instead, she bought a gallon of Crystal Geyser water. It was all in the interest of world peace. Be free. Accept yourself. Love everyone like a brother or a sister. Keep a disciplined approach to life and your goals / personal mission (if you have one).

There were one or two scenes not shot with Dutch Angles. By that time, she was tiring of cattywonky for cattywonky's sake.

The camera shot flat, straight-on shots, nothing "dutched" with angles; nothing made dizzying with too much dolly-work. She needed to tell someone she loved him. She dialed. No answer. She texted. No answer. Same with email. Nothing.

As she descended into a slough of despond, she realized that she could be her own friend, her own companion. Spend more time in the gym. The body that emerges can be your own special friend. Does that make sense? It shouldn't. And, the fact that it does not is good. The most beautiful place on earth is 30 floors up overlooking the Caspian Sea and the "ichiri sheher" -- an old walled city and a drowned fortress, the "Maiden Tower," said to have housed a Azerbaijani variant of Rapunzel.

Then she realized she was not able to "un-Dutch" herself. All angles, all perspectives were destined to be high-angle and to not conform to those of the world. Ah. Nice. Eventually, with 20-20 hindsight, this will look to have been prescient; somehow fore-telling just what she needed to experience and to do in order to get to a place where love is love and that's all that matters.

Catty wonky.

Calling My Bluff

2010-11-02T21:20:00.000-05:00

http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/bluff.mp3

The server in this restaurant is talking about her leopard gecko that was eaten by her cat.

"I named it 'Pepper Pot' -- it was sad, but it wasn't my fault," she said. The poor gecko was doomed by the name. Who would name a lizard after a soup -- unless you intended it to be one of the ingredients???

I wonder if if the cat got sick from eating a lizard. Cats are so finicky. I'm surprised the cat actually ate it. I would be less surprised if the cat killed the poor lizard and then just threw it over to the side to let it slowly dessicate in the sun.

I am not sure if I can believe anything that the members of the wait-staff are saying. One just tried to convince his co-workers that Britney Spears' "Oops I Did It Again" is a cover of a Louie Armstrong jazz song.

The idea is, well, not completely unbelievable. After all, DeadMau5 did an absolutely transcendant trance / electronica dance mix that was styled on a ballad that was just boring beyond words. I am in the mood to second-guess myself. Was it always such a great idea to insist on going it alone?

I have had opportunities to back-pedal and do a low-key job or part-time ... accept a proposal of marriage... well. I'm sure it wasn't really a bona fide offer. Just some sort of emotional gesture designed to curry favor -- the warmth would wear off quite quickly, if it ever even made it that far after I called the bluff. Calling one's bluff.

I think that's what the Tea Party going to be faced with. If they're really elected, their bluffs will be called. Are they really willing to dismantle government, instead of enjoying the spoils of elected officialdom? Can they resist being co-opted? I have my doubts. It's better not to put people in positions where you call their bluffs. No one likes what they see. What if I had accepted the marriage proposal? Called the bluff? My opinion? No marriage. Just a big row -- on some sort of ridiculous pretext -- pick a fight, recant, refuse to honor the proposal. Say things have changed.

Blame it on the other person's "secret" -- some essential thing they've been hiding, keeping under wraps until now. Now it's a deal-breaker. What "it" is does not matter. And, it does matter that it's impossible to describe or define "it".

Take the Tea Party. Let's say they're elected. How do they save face when their bluff has been called?

It's simple. Just find someone to lay blame upon.

"I want to do all the things I promised in my campaign, but I can't and it's not my fault. It turns out that Washington is a tougher, harder nut to crack than I thought. There are things you would not understand. The situation is complicated. I can't really go into detail. It is just that it's not what it seemed. So. The deal is off."

Honestly, can't you just hear a newly elected Tea Party person saying this -- ways to rationalize that once they got to Washington, the big machine made it impossible to go about developing or maintaining a vision that was at all sustainable (and not simply a self-serving set of jingoistic statements that masquerade as profound ideology).

For the record, I sort of like the Tea Party. And, they make a convenient case study. "The cat ate my gecko." It's sad. For some people (rather cruel and insensitive), it's tragi-comic.

I had something special, but it was eaten by my emotional proxy, my pet, my cat.

Flowchart for Creative Writing -- diagram with audio -- Livescribe

2010-10-31T09:53:00.000-05:00

Flowchart for creative writing assignment (memoirs, autobiography) dealing with settings,contexts, blends of inputs.

http://beyondutopia.net/livescribe/concatenation-of-ideas.PDF
http://beyondutopia.net/livescribe/rural-settings.PDF
http://beyondutopia.net/livescribe/my-hometown.PDF

writing-flowchart-settings
brought to you by Livescribe

Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.

Christmas Pop: Homage #1 to watakushi shōsetsu (20th century Japanese I-Novel)

2010-10-28T22:05:00.006-05:00

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/christmas.mp3

It’s that time of year again. The holidays are approaching. The tunes you only hear at this time of year are trotted out and you’re trotted down memory lane, whether you wanted to do those particular mental and emotional laps or not. Do you like the traditional Christmas tunes, or a blend of old and new?

By "new," I mean all the Christmas "rock," but I don't mean the formerly "new" tunes such as those from movies. I love "White Christmas," and of course, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," which has the sweet, wrenching pathos of Judy Garland's voice...

the next self-destructively doomed singer to have such a voice was .. well... was it Karen Carpenter? "It's Good-bye to Love" stops me in my tracks every time.

I think I like the Christmas-themed 40s and 50s movie tunes even more than the old standards - "Adeste Fidelis," "Good King Wensciazslazs" and "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen." Christmas rock tunes? Yuk. I have to say that I get pretty tired of the 80s "Christmas Rapping" and other "novelty tunes" ...

Weirdly enough, as much as I dislike "Christmas Rapping," and Jose Feliciano's "Feliz Navidad," they trigger very nice associations. "Christmas Rapping" brings memories of driving across town to see my mother, my dad, my brother Paul and my sister, Elaine, to open presents, to eat pumpkin pie, pecan pie, turkey, cold green beans and cranberry sauce. Then, wandering outside to look at the cold, clear sky.

Last Christmas, I was snowed in, along with the rest of the populace, by a colossal 12 inches snowfall. That was record-breaking for Oklahoma. The Oklahoma City airport was shut down for days. My mother and my dad drove over to my condo.

My mom was very frail and afraid to get out of the Suburban due to the ice and snow. If she slipped and fell, she might break her hip or some other bone. My dad loved the idea of helping me dig out of the snow. He grew up in northern Vermont, and he liked to discuss how / where / when to handle inclement (read snowy) weather.

I had to smile when he got stuck and I go to shovel him out -- bending his snow shovel in the process (not good). I'm no expert in shoveling snow, despite my 4 years in upstate New York. There, though, I relied on the apartment crew. Jimmy, a fiesty, short guy who invariably wore plaid flannel shirts and sturdy snow boots, always made sure the driveways were plowed, the walkways and sidewalks shoveled, and plenty of salt and calcium on the surfaces so they they were dry -- despite the snow pushed into mountains at the end of the driveways.

So, I learned nothing at all about shoveling or blowing snow during my sojourn in northern climes.

I did learn about the evils of ice, and for that reason, made sure my mother did not venture out alone on it. We drove back to my parents' house. We stopped by the Shell station near my parents' house & I grabbed a hot coffee. Then we went pulled up in the driveway, and then opened the garage door so my mom would not have to walk on the snow / ice very far.

We made it inside. Everyone was great. We opened presents. My mom got me an L. L. Bean flannel pajama set -- just the kind I love. Very soft, very warm. I apologized for not getting them much -- I think I got my mom soft socks and something else, but I'm not sure what. I brought my dad all kinds of organic crackers and snacks that I bought at the Reasors at 15th and Lewis in Tulsa right after Wednesday tennis drills.

I had bought food and then headed to Norman.

They said I should go -- there would be a huge storm. I had a hard time believing it -- it was 50 degrees and balmy. It was the 23rd -- we had the 24th off from work.

Thankfully, I trusted my dad's weather report. The very next morning, yes, it snowed -- it was a blizzard! I would have been trapped in Tulsa for the entire Christmas weekend, and I would have missed spending time with my parents.

Little did I know that a mere two months later, my mom would slip and fall (just before Valentine's Day) and would break her hip and shoulder. After 30 days in the hospital, most of the time on IV's and unable to even sip water, due to breathing and aspiration problems complicated by pneumonia, she would be released to go home -- to hospice -- basically to die.

Unfortunately (at least in my eyes), no one realized my mom would bounce back -- with the help of the 24-7 home health care, and so when the angels of death (hospice nurses) gave my mother massive doses of morphine and other drugs, they interfered in a dramatic and rather grotesque way on any chance at all of being able to keep going.

I still feel quite guilty. I should have taken a stand and compelled my dad to get rid of hospice. Get rid of the angels of death. As severely, and gravely ill as my mother had been over the last 22 years, I never expected her to not make it.

And, well, as much as I hate the corny "Christmas Rapping" song, it reminds me of my last Christmas with my mother, and all the bittersweet memories one has of a relative who was deeply and chronically ill for most of my adult life.

And, as much as I hated that she suffered, we were all codependent. When she had a good day, we had a good day. When she had a bad day, we all called each other and wrung our hands as we fretted and discussed how inadequate modern medicine is, despite all the advances.

Now, I would say that memory is inadequate, not medicine, and worse -- the postmodern human heart is inadequate; severely lacking.

If reality is a construct, and meaning is to be an iridescent sheen on the water of life, well, sometimes the multiplicities of interpretive possibilities are just too much for me.

I miss my mother.

I did not like to see her suffer. I would not want her to be consigned to a life of endless suffering.

I miss her anyway.

*************************

Note: this is the first of a series of writings inspired by Japanese watakushi shōsetsu, the I-Novel, a very special kind of autobiographical writing (see Naoya Shiga's work).

Notes on Translation from the Guarani

2010-10-19T13:34:00.003-05:00

The experience of translating Paraguayan women authors into English for the anthology, First Light, a 3-year project that was finalized in 2000, was illuminating. In translating into English the work of Paraguayan women writing in Guarani, one must be aware of the temptation to fall into translating the work in a way that will lead scholars and popularizers of the discourse to read the work and use it in a facile manner to support notions representing ideological trends. This is not to say that the themes and/or ideas are not present in the work – but that the translator makes certain choices in the translation process that could lend themselves to appropriation.

Feminist / post-feminist gender issues: If one accepts the notion that the cornerstone of feminist theory is a phenomenology of oppression, then the work of Paraguayan poet Susy Delgado could be used in this manner. In Tata-pype (CLOSE TO THE FIRE), she addresses a poem sequence to her older lover, making a great deal of word play about the fact that he considers himself powerful, important, patriarchal, particularly in relation to her, a woman. In the Guarani, the wordplay creates an ironic dualism used to describe the male psyche – one in which a tender interior coexists with a puffed-up bragadoccio exterior. The Spanish version (written by Susy) more straightforwardly makes fun of the machismo of her companion. Over the years Susy and I have had many conversations on the subject – both about how to depict men in poetry, and the behavior exhibited by the typical Paraguayan male (which Susy described as having been warped by three generations of 10 women to every man, and irresponsible paternity, partially condoned by the church in an official attempt to repopulate the country after two almost genocidal wars). This is not to say that authorial intent has determined the final product, or to say that the translator should place much weight on the authors stated intent.

It was tempting to me, as a translator, to go to the extremes with this particular segment, and to translate it with words that would immediately catch the eye of a feminist critic. It was doubly tempting since I was still partially psychologically enmeshed with a lying, cheating dog of a Paraguayan boyfriend, and revenge fantasies were still percolating just beneath the surface. I even toyed with the idea of putting his name in my English version of Susy’s Guarani and Spanish texts, and making specific references to identifying characteristics (home, job, etc.). In the end, I resisted the temptation; probably because it took me so long to do the translation, and it was too much work to maintain rage, pain and indignation.

Environmental or “green” politics: Sadly enough, in the past century, the environment of Paraguay was misused by colonizers, despite the fact that it does not possess the reserves of gold, silver and tin of its neighbor, Bolivia. The delicate ecosystem found in the Chaco was disturbed, first by rapacious hunters who sport-hunt endangered species, and then by huge hydroelectric projects which result in a vast alteration of the ecosystem (Itaipu dam on the Argentina/Paraguay/Brazil border, and the damming of the Pilcomayo River). Luisa Moreno de Gabaglio writes poetry and short fiction in Guarani and Spanish, and much of them have to do with the abuse of the environment by outsiders. For example, in the story “Keter B.”, she speaks of Spanish-speaking outsiders who hunt and capture an indigenous child, considering her to be a “creature.”

In “The Hanneman House,” a German specialist in arachnids lives in a house where the search for treasure buried and lost during the Chaco War drives men into internecinely homicidal greed. In each case, the Guarani speakers are victimized, while the outsiders (speaking Spanish or German) are portrayed as predators and cruelly analytical in their approach. Science without ethics also characterizes the hunters in her collection of stories, “Cuentos.” Zoologists use their understanding of the endangered species they are hunting to first kill the mother, and to take the pelts of rare peccaries, or to kill truckloads of rare caimans, leaving the skinless carcasses to rot in the hot sun. Luisa, who has a doctorate in veterinary science, pays a great deal of attention to animals – and they are the subjects of most of the “Cuentos.” For that reason, her books have been adopted in the Paraguayan school system (the Guarani and the Spanish versions), where they are used in conjunction with biology / Paraguayan heritage classes. It would be tempting to be more direct in the translation, and to make the environmental agenda more direct. Translating Luisa is quite difficult – she often invents words in Spanish which gives, through distortion of the language, the Spanish a grotesque, surreal cast. It makes the Guarani even more warm and maternal, in contrast.

Further, it is clear that her stories can function as allegories of the lingering pre- and post-Nazi influences in Paraguay, where the disappearances and tortures of animals and indigenous peoples mirror what happened to after the Civil War of 1946 and during the dictatorship of General Stroessner, who used Nazis to instruct his secret police in methods of torture. As such, her narratives are deeply antinomian and deeply questioning of authority that comes from outside, or which has been instructed by outside. In this, Luisa demonstrates the tendency of Paraguayans to express xenophobic and/or isolationist perspectives, where isolationism was historically viewed as a shortcut to utopia. Needless to say, it didn’t work. As an translator, it is difficult for me to keep from letting my own opinions and /or perspectives influence my word choices. If I am honest, I will say that I selected works to translate which illustrate my own attitudes and opinions, which are “green” and aggressively anti-fascistic.

Critiques of dictatorships and the phenomenon of self-censorship: Renee Ferrer writes both in Spanish and Guarani. Two of her books, POR EL OJO DE LA CERRADURA and LOS NUDOS DEL SILENCIO, deal specifically with life under dictatorship, and internalized oppression, which manifests as self-censorship. In LOS NUDOS DEL SILENCIO, the protagonist is married to a man she knows to be a part of the Paraguayan secret police, whom she begins to realize is an expert in torture.

In a trip to Paris, the protagonist falls in love (at a distance) with a Vietnamese exotic dancer, whom she imagines has experienced the same sort of self-repression and self-censorship as herself. In a chapter which structurally replicates the improvisations of a jazz saxophone player to whom the Vietnamese dancer dances, Ferrer’s protagonist riffs on the them of “falsifying” or “faking.” This was an extremely difficult chapter to translate because there were so many options for the words, and the rhythm was so crucial to the narrative.

I realized while I was translating it that I could bring in more of the overtly political, but I decided against it. Perhaps that was not a good choice – but I chose to be more strictly “transparent” and “fluent” in the translation – partially because the author wanted to review the translation (and I acquiesced). In POR EL OJO DE LA CERRADURA, Ferrer writes of Faustian bargains made because people had no option, no opportunity for advancement – a man duped into taking the rap for a crime sits in prison realizing he’ll never be paid the money he was promised, and his sacrifice – all so he could build a house for his mother, his family – will be worthless, as he is reviled, and no one believes his innocence.

Big Wheels

2010-07-31T08:29:00.005-05:00

It made no sense at all to be afraid of a man with the body of a child, paralyzed from neck down, who had no way of perambulating except by means of a motorized wheelchair that had a special air tube he could blow into and control the speed and direction of his special vehicle.

Nevertheless, he was intimidating. You could feel his drive and determination -- it was so intense as to be reckless. If you wanted something and happened to be in his way -- move aside. He was indominatable, or at least seemingly so.

I guess he always had been. After all, that's how he got in this condition in the first place. He possessed a daredevil will. When he was young, he raced four-wheelers -- the kind you see down in sandy riverbeds that tear up point bars and egg-filled nests of endangered turtles and sand tortoises.

For the most part, he was lucky and very skillful. He had a wall of trophies as testament.

One day, he wasn’t so lucky. He flipped. He landed on his neck and broke it in four places.

That was fifteen years ago.

Now, he was paralyzed from neck down. He could not move his hands, arms, legs, feet, toes, or anything in between.

He could still speak, but had to breathe through a tube. When you looked at him or spoke to him, you would never think “invalid.” I never felt pity. Instead, I had the distinct feeling that if I crossed him, something terrible would happen to me, my family, and/or my dogs.

Ordinarily, I would not care, but he was my next-door neighbor, and before I had a good sense of who and how he was, I lodged a complaint with the neighborhood association because someone had parked in front of my home and blocked my driveway, effectively imprisoning me in my home.

I blamed him. It was before I knew he did not drive.

When I realized my mistake, I started sneaking out the back door and taking the roundabout way to my garage.

**********************

His wife was what one might gracefully call "statuesque." She was achingly hot, with boom-boom breasts and an equally booming backside. She was more than a trophy. She was the red, roaring cherry light on the top of a police car.

She was what announced that the law was after you, when the law was inutterably corrupt.

You couldn't say "no." You couldn't say anything at all.

You just looked down on yourself, as though your spirit had already divorced itself from your body, and was sailing off to a world of no pain, no sorrow, no existence, while your hand dipped into your wallet and handed over whatever folding green or warped plastic you could, just to forestall the inevitable...

Right now, you look at her and you imagine she’s saying "thank you" with those fuel-injected lips, pink tongue flickering just within the bounds of your mind's eye.

You should have been with me -- I watched the whole thing from behind a crepe myrtle bush on the edge of my patio. I saw his wife on the miniature porte-a-cochere that partially encircled their home, their front lawn. He was there. I held my breath, and I could hear the backpack-sized breathing machine doing its mechanical wheezing from behind his neck.

You wondered how large he was before his accident. His body looked rubbery and childlike.

He knew everyone must think he had a lot of money to keep a hot piece like that at his side. Was that all? Was there something more?

She seemed almost afraid of him.
He seemed almost afraid of her.

She was wearing black lycra shorts, a shredded lace camisole, 5-inch platform spiked sandals. Her body was the color of cinnamon toast. Her knees spread apart as she dropped down into deep squats that might have been considered plies in a ballet class, but here, at the side of the motorized wheelchair, the kneebends looked earthy, sweaty, agonizingly hot, wet, and crude.

Beads of sweat ran down his forehead. She seemed ready to lick the sweat off his brow with her tongue.

I could swear he was laughing. He loved watching her. She knew how to pull him in.

********************************

Ted Bundy used to wear a cast on his arm when he was at his most predatory. He used it to elicit sympathy from young co-eds, who immediately felt sorry for the cute, fumbling, young man...

John Wayne Gacy use to dress up like a clown when he was at his hungriest. He would don his Pogo, the Clown costume, paint his face white, his lips red, his eyelids dark blue, and then hold up his goofy, half-helpless white-gloved hand and wave to the small boys in the audience...

The Pied Piper played cheerful and irresistible tunes on his flute...

******************************

My neighbor was napping in the sunlight. His wife was painting her nails.

In the distance, cloud piled up, bunched together, and threatened to combine enough to produce rain, perhaps even hail.

************************

Click on the pencast for audio of this "palm of the hand" story (inspired by Kawabata)

fringejournal pencast: big wheels
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mind map on public responses to CO2 injection & hydraulic fracturing
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Confessions of a Dogfighter

2010-04-07T14:43:00.005-05:00

Podcast - audio file

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Do you want to hear about the summer I worked in a tampon factory, or the year I decided to start a dog-fighting business?" asked the woman sitting across the table from Tinguely.

They were in a small restaurant with high aspirations, self-styling itself "bistro" and mixing the Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar" on the sound system, and a menu replete with "nouvelle mix" with items like “pine nut pancake,” “chipotle remoulade,” and “prickly pear jelly andouille.”

Pure Austin, thought Tinguely. Tiresome, on the whole, but when one contrasted it with the usual Tex-Mex fare, which always left Tinguely muttering vile things about her breasts and their propensity to hot-air-balloon on her whenever she ingested too much salt and lard, it wasn't such a bad thing.

"Tiffer, I'm not sure," said Tinguely. The humor she injected into her voice was a bit false. It couldn't be helped. Tiffer, short for Tiffany, was a child of the 70s who had grown up in a privileged home, but who considered herself a brilliant businesswomen, a woman with a Midas touch, not realizing (or acknowledging the obvious) that all her business acumen and sterling successes were due to parental bankrolling.

Tinguely knew there were certain parallels between Tiffer and herself, but she wasn't sure which were true parallels, and which were specious proclivities - that is to say, that Tinguely and Tiffer shared something and they resonated on some level, but it was not so easily relegated to its particular pigeonhole... that is to say that they did not much care for each other. Tiffer, child of the 70s, and Tinguely, of an era two decades later, but of a self-reflexive, self-creating decade that loved carving its own chunk of the 70s into its own consciousness.

"Dogfighting? Tampons?" Tinguely resented Tiffer's desire to call attention herself by means of pseudo-scandalosity.

It was clear that the disharmony between Tiffer’s thoughts and Tinguely’s reality fell squarely somewhere in the way they used language. One was flamboyant, with undercurrents of violence; the other was impatient, ironic, mildly put-upon. One built a mildly hyperbolic reality; the other flattened, perhaps even purposefully deconstructed reality.

In the middle of it all were giant icebergs of ethics.

Life was easier when one could take a pass on ethics. Unfortunately, this was not one of those times. She would have to hear the Tiffer out. Tiffer had bought working interest in Dad's latest high-risk wildcat oil and gas prospects, and there was no real options.

Tinguely ordered the "Duck Debris," a tiny waffle with a quail egg sunny-side up. It was supposed to be an aphrodisiac. It should have included two "huevecitos" (little eggs). Was it even ethical to eat an egg?

As it was, with one egg, there was something wrong with the metaphor. How could they presume aphrodisiocity when all they could muster was one tiny egg, sunnyside up, perched atop bean dip and a sad fried chive and one quarter of a waffle of obscure origin?

Give me a break, thought Tinguely.

She was glad she was on an expense account.

*****************************
Today was a strange day. The workshop she had been so eager to attend ended abruptly when the speaker looked at her iPhone and realized a call had come in from the breeder of champion pugs, who was set to deliver the black-and-white pig she had been awaiting for at two months.

The speaker, a professor from the University of Texas, ran a seismic geomorphology lab with 12 graduate students he pushed in directions that advanced the science and various and sundry scientific ambitions. He was intensely charismatic in a profoundly "Alamo" way that spoke to all free-wheeling, free-thinking Texans who imagined themselves capable of self-invention and free-thinking.

Never mind that Texas had become a myth. Never mind that the collective mythology was simply a tool for community building and bonding.

Never mind that one can't ever quite transcend the fact that they spend their entire lives trying to avoid consciousness, and yet consciousness is what we have when we're alive.

The only ones who truly seek unmediated, unmitigated consciousness are those who have been declared terminal, placed in hospice, and who have decided to rebel, fire their hospice nurses, flush their morphine down the toilet (before it is pilfered by teen-age grand-spawn)...

Life. Living. Consciousness.

Spend your entire life avoiding consciousness. Or at least "most" of your life.

**************************

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein

"I need to predecease my mother," thought Tinguely. It was an intrusive thought, completely unsolicited and unwanted. It was also illogical. Tinguely's mother had died when she was three years of age, and she was raised by her wildcatter father and a succession of housekeepers and private violin tutors, which was to say she raised herself, or, as she preferred to put it, wolves, making her the "wolfling" -- incapable of nurturing or mothering anything except like-minded wild things, of which she had met a total of 3 in her entire life, which now spanned 30 years.

Logic was not serving Tinguely well these days.

A sad version of "Light My Fire" was playing on the sound system. The Doors? It used to be that recordings that 40 or 50 years old were wildly anachronistic. When did that change?

"Ah. Light My Fire. This brings back memories. I liked the original. I'm not sure I like this muzak / rave version," said Tiffer.

"What kind of memories?" asked Tinguely. Tiffer still intimidated her, and she thought it was best to ask quiet, polite questions, and dispense with the darker elements that were obviously poking their heads above the surface, but which Tinguely was not comfortable in addressing.

"Surgicate yourself to Nirvana." The phrase entered Tinguely's mind and she thought immediately of her best friend and others who had tried to convince her that Botox, eyelifts, and "mini-lifts" were something you started budgeting for by the time you were 30.

Might as well take up tennis when you're 50-something, and at least four decades too late for anything except nostalgia and self-congratulatory bouts of muscle spasms and incipient tennis elbow (if only you had sufficient attention span and muscle tone to acquire such a malady)...

"Tiffer, I don't want to hear a single word about dog-fighting," said Tinguely. Unfortunately, Tiffer had already left the room, so Tinguely's brave declaration was essentially moot.

****************
The Psychic Sponge's Guide to Zeitgeistland: "Love Philtre"

Elevator to Nowhere

2010-03-29T15:09:00.000-05:00

Audio File / Podcast: http://beyondutopia.net/podcasts/elevator.mp3

It had been a long day. Tinguely Querer was ready to leave her office. But, the elevators were malfunctioning again.

Not relying on the technology to repair the new, streamlined elevator, Tinguely decided to take the old reliable workhorse, the freight elevator.

How appropriate, thought Tinguely, as she felt she was getting a bit husky these days. It was hard to keep up the level of exercise she needed in order to maintain her weight. She was nursing a strained foot from the “turbo Air” footware that failed to live up to its promise of an effortless, injury-free run.

"The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control." (Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre, 1954)

The lobby of the high-rise office building smelled of the latest “green” biocide used to keep the mold and rodent problem in check.

The freight elevator door opened slowly. Tinguely saw two men tumble into the door from the street entrance.

“You need to give me back my wallet. Now. I am serious.” A 60-something man was shouting to a young black man wearing a dark brown shirt, tight khaki jeans.

“You need to have a little respect. Respect. Now.” The young black man was on the verge of hyperventilation.

Lalica, the evening receptionist, leapt to her feet. Lalica had dark brown hair, and she tended to wear floral blouses.

“Boys! Stop it right now! There is glass in here! You could get hurt!”

The young black man sank slowly to the floor, put his head on his knees. He was sobbing. The older man pulled the young man’s shirt. “Give me back my wallet. You had no right.”

The sobbing was disconcerting. Tinguely was uncertain what she should do.

“You had no right,” sobbed the young man. The 60s-something man was frantic to get his wallet. He tugged on the young man’s shirt, his pants, groped in his pockets.

“Don’t take that – that’s my new iPod!” wailed the young black man. “It’s the only thing I’ve got that works!”

The malfunctioning elevator door yawned open wide to the dark cavernous shaft.

Pulling something from the young man’s pocket, the 60s-something man darted toward the elevator, not realizing what the door had opened to. He plunged through the open elevator doors.

Tinguely dug out her BlackBerry. “911.”

Lalica nodded. The young man continued sobbing, oblivious. As Tinguely dialed, the foot injured by inadequate running shoe technology throbbed. The malfunctioning elevator door went into spasms of opening and closing.

“It’s going to be hard to get through that,” commented Tinguely.

“The fall probably broke his iPod,” said Lalica.

"Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheaia, truth, happens." (Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre, 1954)

Tinguely walked slowly toward the wall of mailboxes in the high-rise apartment building where she was renting a bedraggled two-bedroom apartment. A tenant holding a paisley backpack was fumbling for her key. A tall, slender 70-something man held his restless Pomeranian.

“Bella. Relax. We’ll take a walk soon.”

Tinguely read the notice on the wall:

“Water Off from 6:30 am to Noon. We apologize for the inconvenience. West chase only.”

“No water again?” Her voice was indignant.

It was better not to say anything. After all, there was nothing to add. Her words would not influence the functioning of the plumbing.

“Another suicide. They have to turn off the water. Some kind of repair,” said the paisley backpack girl tenant.

“Well. Having the water off again will surely inspire another suicide. I do not know why it takes them so long to flush out the drains.” The 70-something man was huffy.

“That’s the third suicide this month,” said Tinguely.

“The curling iron in the bathtub may have been an accident.” The man did not seem to like the conversation.

“As was the death of the guy whose GPS unit instructed him to jump off the balcony from the 23rd floor?” asked the paisley backpack girl.

“Our machines are turning against us,” said Tinguely.

“Machines still save time,” said the man. “I love my high-speed coffee grinder and my new microwave.”

“Save time for what?” replied the paisley backpack girl, darkly. “Degradation and mind games?”

The Pomeranian barked, whined, shook her head, rattled her collar.

“Bella, is your ear still bothering you?”

The man’s brown eyes watered, and he patted the dog’s head lovingly.

“We just implanted a chip in Bella’s ear. This way, I always know where she is. She can’t run away from me. Ever again.”

“I wouldn’t trust it. The tracking device,” said the paisley backpack girl, glumly. “Bella is a girl dog. Bella, tear that chip out of your ear! It will only oppress and enslave you!”

“My dear, your comments are most unwelcome. Bella wants me to be able to find her,” said the man. He pursed his lips.

“Me, either. You’ve got to know your machines. You have to show them who’s boss,” said Tinguely.

Bella leapt from the arms of her owner. Her reddish-gold fur shimmered. She barked fiercely at Tinguely.

“Don’t worry, Bella. I’m on your side. I know someone who wants to chip me.” Tinguely looked down at her new Google phone which had built-in GPS, synched to Google maps. People in her Facebook network could tell where she was at all times.

She sighed. It was time to pay someone to take her Google phone and to drive aimlessly to random places, just to teach anyone who would track her movements that she was not going down without a fight.

It was not right to reduce her to a pixel on a digital map, and make faulty conclusions about her supposed movements.

Unfortunately, freedom and privacy were going to cost her money. She would have to get a new cell plan for herself.

The girl with the paisley backpack pushed up her sweatshirt, revealing Japanese calligraphy tattoos. She addressed Bella.

“Look Bella, it’s like this. You are negotiating with a hostile nation. You can’t go in and offer concessions right off the bat. You have to have a few kills under your belt. That gets their attention. It garners respect.”

“Do you realize you are talking to a dog?” asked the man. He placed Bella on the ground, attached a leash to her collar and strode away.

The door to the street opened and closed as the man left, Bella leading the way. The glass panes were clear. The lights of the city were twinkling. The empty parking lot and the abandoned gas station across the street were bathed in an eerie glow.

“You’re going to go on a walk on a night like this?” asked Tinguely.

No one responded.

The door opened and closed again. The night air outside smelled like lilacs and burning plastic.

“This is the way things really are, I guess,” said Tinguely. The chemicals and particulates in the air burned her eyes.

For the first time, she noticed that charred polyethylene smelled oddly of brimstone.

She suddenly could not imagine herself living here long.

********

"Technology is a way of revealing" (Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre, 1954)

Thoughts
Mathematical Knowledge Is Constructed:

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679): Mathematics and the political state both constructed from arbitrary states

Giambattista Vico (1668-1774): History is made by humans in collective action

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): The mind is active in the formation of knowledge, and creates categories.

Gottlieb Fichte: The mind “posits” reality and its positing is prior even to the laws of logic.

Hegel (1770-1831): Categories develop through time and history, focus on non-Being from Being to produce the synthesis of Becoming

Marx and Engels: Frameworks (or ideologies) are terms in which people understand the world; math is an ideology?

Poincare: Mathematics is built up from mathematical induction.

Jan E. Brouwer: Mathematics is built from the ability to count

Rudolf Carnap: Logical positivist – we build our idea of knowledge from sense data (logical constructions from sense data)

Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934): Cognitive development is in stages; focuses on the social dimension of the development of a child’s conceptual framework

The Skin and Bone Bags We Were Born Into

2010-03-15T20:29:00.003-05:00

Podcast / Audio: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/skinandbonebag.mp3

"My skin and bone bag is looking even worse than ever," said Tinguely to her dad. He was reviewing a set of maps on their prospect and reviewing where they still needed to lease the subsurface rights. "My face looks haggard. I'm getting fat. Worst of all, I'm getting fat in all the wrong places."

"You don't have anything to worry about. How would you like to be me and have to look in the mirror every morning?" said Dad. "The clock runs just one way. Forward."

"It's the stress," said Tinguely.

They were having coffee at Marvetta's Cafe, a small country diner on State Highway 99 on the way to the oil and mostly depleted oil and gas field in Okfuskee County.

The waitress smiled. She was small and had a rather unwholesome energy, possibly dawn to midnight slugs of coffee and lard-based gravy ladled over lard-riddled biscuits.

"Yup. Pretty ridiculous to be all uppity and prideful about one's body. You get what you're born into. You have what you have," she said Her lips were wrinkled around the edges like a long-time smoker. She was thin, and her skin looked thick

"Pour me another cup, please, JoBeth," said Tinguely, reading the "Hi, I'm JoBeth" tag affixed to the crisp, white waitress blouse. "I'll take an order of biscuits and gravy. Torpedoes be damned. Humor the skin and bone bag while you've still got one."

Dad looked rueful.

"Look at her. Promise her a warm bed, full water bowl and dog dish, and she'll follow you anywhere," said Dad.

Tinguely was surprised Dad would say this. Nothing could be further from the truth."

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

Yup. No doubt. My skin and bone bag is looking even worse than usual these day, thought Tinguely.

If someone else had said it, I would have smiled, thought Tinguely. She loved poking fun at the hubris of anyone who took credit for beauty, athletic prowess, skin color, and cognitive pizzazz.

Hah! Hubris! Don’t we all know that it’s all a matter of the skin and bone bag we happened to be born into?? Nature vs. nurture? Yeah. They matter. But, by an large, the factors that affect both nature and nuture are totally luck of the draw. What skin and bone bag were you born into?

Well. Whatever it is. Live with it.

Sigh.

We get used to our particular skin and bone bags. Eventually, we figure out how to work them. We learn how to get the maximum benefit from them – we learn just what everything takes.

Good grief. This sounds like we’re going into a conversation about aging, illness, and passages. I don’t want to think about that. We all go through it. I have a friend who has convinced herself that it must not be such a bad thing – after all, every person who is born has to die. So, why should dying be any more traumatic than being born?

Of course, some people are dying even as they are born – at least that’s what some would have you think. I, personally, think that no one is born until they take their first breath. I know that’s ethically problematic, but it’s easier to measure, easier to deal with. I hate to think of all the women who have been forced into abortions (either by cultural, economic, or political exigencies) are going to go to eternity as murderesses. It is just not possible.

Nature is harsh. Human practices are equally so. If we take the right-to-life approach, we could stand back in amazement and horror as a gardener weeds her garden. If we take this logic to an extreme, we can see problems with pesticides and herbicides as well. But, we should look at “culling” as something horrendous, heinous, heart-wrenching.

That’s the way it is.

Birth, death, cycles, eternal return. These are the words that self-juxtapose in my mind.

Then, of course, the narrative of eternal return – the apocalyptic narrative.

I’m sick of it.

You’d think everyone else would be equally sick of it. I mean, what’s so seductive about the end of the world as we know it, and the “reconquista” – the reordering of the world, in the image of those who have the forebearance to stick around and do the defining/ redefining…?

What’s so seductive about mass death followed by mass re-animation?

I used to like it. Now it just seems tiresome. Hah. It’s endless. The narrative has a built-in self-destruct mechanism.

Sadly, we’re foolish enough to apply that internal, built-in self-destruct narrative into virtually everything we build and onto which we depend for our profit, our prosecution (of wars), our progeny, and our pride.

Yeah. That’s it. Keep it going.

Hah. I think not.

Nice to be addicted, isn’t it? Adrenaline junkies? Does that explain it? No. We’re closure junkies. It’s ugly.

So. We plaster virtually everything we do or create with a narrative that – well, really – never ever fits. Think of an artist crunking in paint on a canvas. Think of sloppy, thick brush strokes. No – think of a palette knife. That artist slathers on the paint like “lashings!” of clotted cream. Oh yes, those thick globs of paint are sweet, but they’re also messy and all too sweet/sour. I’m just saying that to let you know the apocalyptic narrative has become a brush with way too much paint; a palette knife loaded up with ugly pigment to be applied in big ugly globs on a canvas we call our life.

No!

Stop it! Our lives are too delicate, with thin threaded lace for structure. It’s just not fair to slam down the 20-tonne narrative – apocalypse – on the fragile scaffolding we’ve erected and which we’ve started to call consciousness.

This life has too much imbalance.

It’s like throwing a shotput into a flowerbed filled with tiny, delicate leaflings and new blooms.

Sigh.

I don’t know what else to say.

I must stop.

Forgive me as I weep.

************************

"I'll have the same," said Dad. He ordered biscuits and gravy.

"Are you sure that's what you want? The sodium. Your cholesterol." Tinguely realized the hypocrisy but continued to speak.

JoBeth winked at Dad. Tinguely's face flushed. She felt annoyance, but decided not to respond. It was't worth it. After all, it was all in fun. Was it the waitress's fault she wasn't invited to play the same game?

"Live it up. Gather ye rosebuds, as they say," said Tinguely. "Carpe diem."

A truck backfired. A flock of starlings squawked, left droppings on whatever lay below. A cloud passed over the sun. The shadow passed quickly.

They were hungry.

Vanished Without a Trace: Clowser, Hurricane Hunter

2010-03-12T13:38:00.004-06:00

Podcast / Audio recording: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/clowser.mp3

Tinguely Querer had decided to buy old Clowser's farm. She still remembered the night old Clowser's barn burned down and the stories that were told. It was now on the market, and Tinguely sensed that the unsolved mystery of Clowser's son's disappearance could be solved if only she could take possession of the farm, and the new barn they built on the ashes of the old. His plane went missing in the Bermuda Triangle years ago.

"Why cash? Why not a loan?," said Evalina Baugrozen.

Evalina was an attorney, but not a very confident one. But, something about Tinguely gave her new-found "brass" and spunk. She was not experienced enough to realize that Tinguely had made her a fantastic deal -- not because of generosity, but because of sentimentality.

"I want to get this done. I want to close quickly," said Tinguely.

Tinguely had just advised her father not to sell his wheat farm in Grant County, Oklahoma, with a "take or pay" contract with a pipeline company to sell the gas produced from the Red Fork sand. The wells were in the middle of the Cherokita Trend.

"You've got a good deal, Dad. It's rare any more that the minerals go with the surface." It was something she said often to her father. In fact, she had used his wheat farm and oil production as a case study for one of her courses in her MBA program.

Evalina looked at Tinguely.

"What is it that you see in the old Clowser place?" asked Evalina.

"It's complicated," said Tinguely. It was not really complicated at all. She wanted Clowser's farm.
Tinguely's judgment was compromised by her sentimentality. She liked to idealize her childhood. Her early years were lonely. She learned to read music before she could read words. She was four and reading music, playing the piano in recitals. Mrs. Crow, her teacher, considered Tinguely her prodigy. Things might have progressed, but Mrs. Crow's husband graduated from the University of Oklahoma, and he and his wife, the lovely Mrs. Crow, moved to a town that had offered Reverend Crow a position in their parish.

Did either one have any idea? Of course not. Their psyches had been tainted by "righteousness" -- they were just so convinced of their moral authority, and that they had taken the "high road" -- even though there was not one scrap of evidence to support them.

Flash Memory. Return to the summer her parents moved to the house at the end of a isolated cul-de-sac, positioned like a strange apostrophe to a developer's fantasy, between wheat farms and a strange, overgrown set of fields, farm ponds, farm house, and big barn.

No one ever saw anyone at old Clowser's farm. Rumor had it that his family had homesteaded the 160-acre patch of South Canadian River bottomland. He owned it outright, being the only child of the original homesteaders' only child. Old Clowser himself had an only child - a son -- who, sadly, disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle while flying his instrument-laden small jet into the eye of a Caribbean hurricane.

He was a "Hurricane Hunter" for NOAA, and he paid the ultimate price for poking the eye of the hurricane. No one even remember the name of the hurricane that took him into some unknown dimension -- probably shattered to bits, but the conspiracy theorists preferred the idea of alien spacecrafts sucking in trespassers into "their" airspace. Some scientists liked to conjecture that the Bermuda Triangle is a place where space warps back on itself. Dark energy becomes a force that pushes time and space, not just wind and rain and hail... Several scientists hypothesized that the atmospheric conditions resulted in tunnels of dark energy, and a virtual space warp.

Some suggested that Clowser's son's plane was pulverized by the high winds, and Young Clowser himself fell to earth (or water, as the case might be), like a twentieth-century Icarus, whose hubris was not his own, but was inherited -- by brazen, transgressive folk who believed that just by casting their eye on a particular place or space, they could "own" it -- regardless of previous or existing claims.

Clowser's son was an Amelia Earhardt without the glamour and publicity. He was a risk-taker. He went solo. He was an aviator for reasons other than the love of soaring on rivers of air. He loved punching into the place beyond the edge. Kick into another dimension. Smack life into your truest heart. What does that mean? Don't look. Don't care.

******************
Stats and Facts:
Eighty-seven percent of missing aircraft go missing in the Bermuda Triangle.
Intense super-cells develop between high and low-pressure air masses.
In the transition zone, it is not uncommon to find "electrical fog" -- static electricity so thick it looks like fog.
Some scientists have speculated that horizontal electrical tornadoes form -- they are tunnels of dark energy.

*******************

When Clowser's barn burned, someone said a fireball shot out of the barn door. It occured because of hay dust.

"You know, hay dust is as flammable as gasoline," said one of the firefighters who was interviewed for The Norman Transcript. "It's the same thing that can happen in a grain silo. Static electricity can ignite it. It can happen at any time."

Tinguely read about St. Elmo's Fire. It was static electricity that dance along the sails in old clipper ships and the galleons favored by buccaneers. Tinguely wondered if there might be more St. Elmo's Fire in the Bermuda Triangle than in other places.

Was "electric fog" something you could find in windy places on land as well as sea? Could a tornado churning through the Texas Panhandle be accompanied by roiling electrical fog?

She had the feeliing that there was some sort of energy triangle that came together right where Old Clowser's barn burned to the ground.

There had to be a connection between the barn, the fireball, the Bermuda Triangle, and Old Clowser's only son, that intrepid young "Hurricane Hunter" who vanished without a trace.

********************

"Tinguely, you'll be happy to hear your offer was accepted," said Evalina.

"Thank you, Ms. Baugrozen," said Tinguely. She pronounced Baugrozen so it sounded like a large mastiff's bark.

"Now that you have the land, do you have any plans?" asked Evalina. "Do you plan to put in a housing addition?"

"I'm going to build a barn."

"Farming? That doesn't seem like you, if you don't mind my saying so," said Evalina. She snapped her black patent clutch shut after replacing her pen and her BlackBerry.

"Not farming. Hurricane hunting," said Evalina.

"Well, I think you may be barking up the wrong tree if you plan to build a barn to do that. Unless, of course, you fill it with computer link-ups to weather satellites."

"I'm still working out the details," said Tinguely.

"Well, do what you like. The Clowsers were well thought of in their day. They homesteaded the place, you know," said Evalina.

"Yes."

It was done. The deal was inked. Now all was left was to slip into a horizontal tube of dark energy and seek the place where space warps back on itself.

Then she could do it again. Watch that ball of fire, that fireball of inflammable hay dust, and determine if it happened the moment knowledge itself sparked -- or perhaps self-awareness -- sparked, ignited, and caused the seekers of consciousness and perception to vanish without a trace.

Highly recommended blog: Jefferson Hansen
twincitiesjazzscene.com

I, Vampire: Part III

2010-01-30T16:23:00.006-06:00

Podcast: http://www.zenzebra.net/podcast/i-vampire-part-3.mp3

Angoisse / Anxiety: One can define these terms in many ways. One awkward, but revealing way is to say it’s the tension one feels when one realizes they’re always running the risk of being abandoned or existing in a state of revulsion – just after they’ve felt the glorious moment of engulfment or, well, the myth of total unity. Absolute unity is a condition reserved for the afterlife. No one really wants it in the here and now, no matter how they profess a desire for it.

The road to Wal-Mart was barricaded by police cars cordoning off the rural hospital so a med-evac helicopter could land on the two-laned asphalt street leading to the emergency room. Tinguely turned the corner as a deputy sheriff waved angrily at her, and a man with a headset spoke and looked at his watch.

Tinguely’s stomach clenched. She averted her eyes. Her pulse raced. She did not want to think about what might happen next. She felt anxious.

As the automatic doors slid open, Tinguely felt herself calm. The smell of grilling hotdogs mixed with disinfectant.

The Wal-Mart greeter said hello to Tinguely. Another offered her a glistening hunk of sausage on the end of a toothpick. When Tinguely shook her head “no” she moved on to the next guest. Tinguely did have a chance to ask the greeter if they carried Roberto Bolano's final book, 2666, in Spanish. She half-expected to find it in the original Spanish, since at least 60 percent of the population spoke Spanish. It used to be more, but Burmese and Somalian refugees had been brought in to fill the slaughterhouse jobs that had once been filled by illegal Mexican immigrants.

At the very least, she'd be able to find the English version. She felt sure of that.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. There were no books in Spanish. There were a few Spanish language tabloids, and a few DVDs featuring black and white "clasicos" of "el cine mexicano." She recognized Cantinflas, a populist everyman who rivaled Charlie Chaplin in popularity. Cantinflas had a bit more "chispa" or spark. At least, that was Tinguely's opinion. She had only seen one Charlie Chaplin movie, and she disagreed with its politics.

There were a few shiny best-sellers and a wall of Harlequin romances. A middle-aged woman looked up, startled, as Tinguely walked by.

Tinguely experimented with telepathy. She directed thoughts directly to the woman: "I know what you're after. You're hooked on the raunchy hot scenes! We all know what's in those books!!"

If the woman could hear Tinguely's thoughts, she gave no indication of it. Tinguely peered into her shopping cart. A twelve-pack of Fanta Grape. An eight-pack of Charmin toilet paper. Cheerios. Doritos. Salsa. Needle-nosed pliers. Cat litter. Bunion pads.

***********************************

The Wal-Mart book section was next to the in-store McDonald’s. A young Hispanic woman sat with her two children. They were eating French fries and drinking a Coke. The woman was examining a bottle of nail polish. Tinguely thought she would enjoy 2666. But, perhaps she would not.

Je t’aime! It had the same sound as a meadowlark’s song, or a crow or a raven. It is the sound one makes when one is flying in one’s dreams, or simply with eyes closed, gripped in a fatal embrace. (For the lonely spirit, that fatal embrace is also known as “life.” For the vampire, that fatal embrace is also known as “blood”).

Back to the books. The latest vampire series was next to the section marked Inspirational. Nowhere was there the award-winning masterwork of a thoughtful Spanish-speaking writer (translated to English), whose noir Touch of Evil for the 21st century explored what, exactly, lived in the border between states of being. This time the work of art would focus on Ciudad Juarez and not Tijuana. In both cases, the emphasis was on appetite. At least that's what Tinguely wagered. She had no idea, but wanted to know.

If Wal-Mart could sell vampire fantasies to middle-schoolers, why couldn't they sell a novel that confronted the way people prefer to go subterranean when they feel their core identity is at risk? Why is it they go underground when what they really are could make them vulnerable?

Go subterranean when your core identity is compromised.

Go underground. Invest in a human trafficker. Move north, south, east, or west. Believe in reinvention.

Reinvent & wrap your their fingers around the throat of hope. Touch it. Then run from it. It is the only logical way to live.

The woman seated at a bench table at McDonald’s with her two children took out the nail polish, shook it, then deftly applied the tip of the tiny brush to her younger daughter’s index finger. The girl was wearing a pink hoodie and wore a pink bow in her dark, wavy brown hair. Her ears were pierced. She wore pearls.

It was easier to keep the vampires in lightweight fiction written by a conservative Mormon virgin, whose creatures of the night were innocuous prom-goers and paragons of faux-Goth fashion.

***********************************************

I love you! Je’taime! Te amo! It makes no difference how one says it. The words simply reflect the inadequacy of language to express something that probably should stay ineffable. After all, if you stripped love of its ineffability, you’d probably strip it of its power.

Disappointed to not be able to buy the book, Tinguely roamed through office supplies. She decided to buy a pack of multicolored file folders and index cards. For reading material, she grabbed "The Worst Celeb Diets" issue of the National Enquirer. Cellulite and shots of celebrities who had packed on 50 or 60 pounds reassured her that yes, we're all ordinary mortals.

The sound of an ambulance distracted her as she walked through the Wal-Mart parking lot. Love and death had been united since the time of Dionysus, perhaps even longer.

Death, life, and the sacred.

A north wind brought the smell of the stockyards to her. The acrid smell burned her eyes. A Burmese man wearing a long fold of cloth like a skirt walked pushed a bicycle. A Catholic nun stood in the corner of the parking lot. A small, sand-blasted, sun-faded van looked to be filled with folded lawn chairs. Tinguely saw a small box filled with small plastic rosaries -- the ones you'd receive as gifts at a first communion.

Tinguely thought of the Tibetan prayer flags she had purchased in a small store near Lark Street in downtown Albany, NY. Would a refugee set up a small Buddhist shop here in the Texas Panhandle? Would the Somalis set up shop, start small enterprises here on the prairie?

Unlike the seething dynamism of the Mexican-American border, the Somalis and the Burmese were clumped together. Islands? Dollops of humanity plopped onto cracked caliche? Immiscible cultures, at least for a generation or so. That was the impression that was given.

It was a kind of protection.

At least, that is what it seemed in comparison to the cultures that did knot, twist, stream, and flow together (and apart). Helicopter rotors. A man shouting. Blood on a gurney. A man taking notes, writing. A woman searching for a book to explain it all.

And that same woman walking back to her car forced to satisfy herself with a tabloid and the realization that the only one who had any solutions at all in the entire 10,000 square mile expanse was the lone nun with a van full of lawn furniture and rosaries.

Pray if you can.

I, Vampire, Part II

2010-01-30T16:20:00.003-06:00

Podcast: http://www.zenzebra.net/podcast/i-vampire-part-2.mp3

Captivity and all its synonyms. They are so potent, they almost have a taste. One could say they taste like absinthe, but that would be too easy. The spirit’s captivity is the stuff of mad poets and a person who likes to extract juice from a wormwood tree.

Tinguely pulled out her checkbook and a pen.

Bazila masked her “alpha dog” dominance and feigned submission.

Tinguely laughed ruefully. “Bazila, admit it. It feels good to be a captive. It’s stimulating to plot and scheme our escape. And then, there’s the sweetness of the revenge fantasy. Or, if you’re not in the mood to be a rebel, you can whine about your condition without doing anything.”

“On behalf of the LLC, I would like to thank you most sincerely for your generous donation,” said Bazila.

The donation was satisfying, but ultimately futile, thought Tinguely after she left.

Tinguely would wager all the cash she had in her wallet (which was around $350) that Bazila spent her evenings working on her own teen vampire novel. Would Bazila’s version feature sexual slavery and forced abortions for stem cells?

Tinguely shuddered.

**********************************
The taste of freedom is not sweet. It is not sour. It is either woody or metallic. Once you swallow it, you realize you’ve been poisoned.

“It was the best book I ever read,” said the girl at the Dairy Queen, whom Tinguely spotted with a copy of I, Vampire. She appeared to be about 12.

“You were able to read this stuff while eating?” Tinguely was surprised. Was it the same book she had read? Were she and the girl with the book even on the same planet?

“Well, the stuff about embalming fluid was sort of creepy, but I’m not really sure what that is,” said the girl. “I felt sad for Romulus. I mean, he needed blood so soooo badly.”

“”I think I need to be sick,” said Tinguely.

“Oh. The bathroom’s out of order. Don’t go in. You’ll be sorry,” said the young girl.

“Isn’t it against some sort of health ordinance to have an inoperable restroom at an eating establishment?” asked Tinguely.

“It just happened,” said the girl. She picked up her book, put it into her cute Oscar the Grouch “tween” messenger bag.

**********************************
A state of grace is the state you’re in when you realize you don’t have to think about the “big issues” – life, death, or whatever it is that troubles that pesky part of the cerebral cortex that reminds you of the irreducibility of consciousness.

Flickering red lights on the horizon indicated the extent of the wind farm. The blinking red lights on the tops of the wind turbines extended to the horizon like beads on a rosary or glittering paternoster lakes seen mile high as flying over the Rocky Mountains directly northwest of here.

Human beings can’t really deal with consciousness. That’s why they invented religion.

It was a good night to curl up with a true crime paperback, or to watch a rerun of a beauty pageant or documentary about the secret life of the domestic house cat.

I, Vampire: Part I

2010-01-30T16:13:00.005-06:00

Podcast: http://www.zenzebra.net/podcast/i-vampire-part-1.mp3

Dominate. No, don’t dominate. This calculus is not interesting. The terms are just too diametrically opposed. Let’s stay somewhere in the middle, where negotiation is at least a viable option.

“This is your recommendation?” Tinguely almost dropped the book in astonishment. She was not a prude, but it was easily the most shocking book she had ever read. And, it was being proffered as high-toned reading for the teens of this small high-plains windfarm-and-slaughterhouse Texas Panhandle town.

The local Library Ladies Club had recommended I, Vampire for the Teen Book of the Month.

It did not seem to bother the largely Christian evangelical members of the group that the book’s heroine had been made a vampire in a highly suspect, perhaps even devilish, manner.

Further, these proper pillars of the community did not seem to take note that the 16-year-old protagonist of clear eyes, cherubic blonde curls, and peony lips, was, in fact, part of a small army of minions -- volitionless undead who skulked around in the service of the gaunt yet magnetic doppelganger of a uneasily fey young Johnny Depp.

“That is, uh, different,” said Tinguely. Her voice trailed off. “Different. Yes. I’m usually all for different, but not in this way.”

“All teens feel different,” said Bazila Haycroft, President-Elect of the Library Ladies Club. Bazila was a softish woman with droopy eyes and large breasts. She had a nice smile, though. “I, Vampire shows that even if you think of yourself as a rather sickening creature with loathsome habits, you can find others who accept you.”

**********************************************************

Dead. Undead. The two states of being are too absolute for the average person to want to accept. Give me a medium or a palm reader to communicate with the part of my own consciousness I call “the spirits” or “ghosts.” We love to roam the vast pasture where the very idea of the dead and the undead is as annoying as horseflies and sandburs.

“What was wrong with I, Robot?” asked Tinguely.

Bazila looked at her blandly.

“I, Robot is not so, well, sexualized. I mean, why would you want to feed teen hormones? Especially girl hormones,” continued Tinguely. “Those little ladies can get pregnant, you know. Starve out that hussy madness, I say. Focus on philosophy and machines.”

Tinguely had just turned 30, and had clearly forgotten what it was like to have recently weathered the storms of puberty. Or, perhaps she did, and that accounted for her rather extreme position.

“I’m sorry. I don’t think we’ve met,” said Bazila, rather frostily.

“Oh. I’m Tinguely Querer. I’m just visiting. I thought I’d check out the library. Maybe make a tax-deductible donation to help you build your collection,” she said, making a groping motion toward her purse. “Do you accept checks or credit cards?”

Bazila softened. It was pretty transparent that Bazila’s warmth was conditional on the size of the perceived donation, but it was endearing rather than Machiavellian. “Yes, we’d love to build our literacy collection. We want to help our children.”

Tinguely sighed.

“Well, I don’t know why you’re sinking to the level of teen vampires. Are you really so intent on destroying every single victory of feminism? You know it will happen if you encourage this nasty habit of encouraging girls to think it’s exciting to be bitten, have blood drained from their necks, and then become the passionate slave of a tyrant vampire,” snapped Tinguely.

“How much were you thinking of donating to our library?” asked Bazila.

********************************************************

The body: The flesh machine. Consciousness? Utterly unconscious? Programmed? Neither state is particularly satisfying. The problem resembles the free will vs. predestination dichotomy. No one wants either pure free will or absolute predestination, even though people have even built religions around their favorite one in order to give it just the right level of gravitas to be convincing.

“Would you be willing to cull the girl vampire books?” asked Tinguely. “Oh forget it. I know you wouldn’t. Plus, I’m philosophically opposed to censorship. I hate the message of the vampire books. But, I do love I, Robot.”

Bazila glowered.

“Tinguely, we’ve just met, but I want to tell you that in my opinion, I, Robot has all sorts of unwholesome messages, too. The machines are always on the verge of killing their masters. They are smarter, more logical, and have absolutely no conscience or feelings. The robots are sort of psychopathic, if you ask me. We think it sends the wrong message, especially to our teen boys.”

Tinguely brightened at the thought of machines gaining self-awareness and either attacking their masters or simply going on strike. She looked at her iPhone. In an I,Robot world, her iPhone, hand held device, or smart phone could be her best friend. Her phone could even be her mentor. She would never have to be lonely again. Just keep the smartphone fully charged.

Truth be told, Tinguely was working on her own updated version of I, Robot. She gave Bazila a brief overview. She decided not to go into the parts of the book that dealt with organ harvesting, and in kidnapping young women to turn them into human egg incubators.

“When you finish your book, perhaps you could do a book signing here at the library,” said Bazila. “ And now I want to get back to I, Vampire.”

“Bazila, I think we’re just going to go around and around on this. I’m fearful of teenage sexuality. You should be, too. But, you’d rather be dominated by a pale, bloodsucking undead male than a strong, consistent, and predictable machine.”

“Why do we have to be dominated by anything at all?” asked Bazila.

“Because we can’t be happy unless we’re in distress, and we can't be happy unless we're absolutely desperate to break free from something we think is chaining our ankles and pulling us back to earth.”

Review and Reflection on John Vick's Chaperons of a Lost Poet

2010-01-17T13:26:00.003-06:00

There is something about a long poem that refers to one's youth and coming of age in Oklahoma that evokes pain, longing, nostalgia, and a bimodal innocence/experience tension.

Norman often becomes the epicenter of awakenings and self-awareness. The reason for it is often attributed to the fact that the state's largest university is located in Norman, but I think it's much more than that. After all, Norman is the convergence point of disparate but all equally emotionally destabilizing realities: Tribal autonomy, yet betrayal (Potawatomi, Chickasaw, Absentee Shawnee nations within 20 miles), the Oklahoma's largest mental health complex (not the university, as the wags would have it), the National Severe Storms Lab (with its legions of tornado-chasers), the site of the great Land Rush / Land Run, just to name a few.

Oklahoma is fond of the spectacle. Of all the states of the Union, it is probably the most theatrical -- after all, who else has a Broadway show tune as their official State Anthem?

But, I digress.

John Vick's Lost Chaperons of a Lost Poet is a long poem shot through with Oklahoma consciousness.

What does that mean? For one, it incorporates a deep, solid appreciation for all things passionate, showy, even destructive. There are tornadoes so intense they pull the grass up from the medians, reduce shopping malls to bare concrete slabs.

On another level, there is the longing and the frisson of drag. The glossy and brittle stylings of a Tulsa art deco soiree; but the 2-hour drive to Norman, where the stylings meet hot sweat and tears and awakenings -- this is what surges from John Vick's writing.

Vick's voice is decidedly phlegmatic; it refuses to pander, and nor does it whine. This is surprising, since so many of Oklahoma childhoods become hyper-aware of the unstated desires of those who surround them -- especially those who are off-limits.

There is something very compelling about the journey of memory and time; revisiting the gritty beer, pizza margarita & garlic hand-tossed or the college joints. It is a plunge into recently converted dive bar squeaky clean exotic dancer alleyways, flowering in response to the "must-do du jour" energies of the state's largest and most prestigious university and all its hangers-on...

Vick may write of other places, and his narrative takes the shape of a collage of scraps of paper, text-messages, emails, updates and feeds, "tweets.” He writes of things happening 25 years ago, but he uses the latest technologies. The reader understands that he’s using whatever it takes to have a revisited birth of consciousness.

As such, the awakening is surprising, even upsetting.

There is a sweetness about Vick's narrative, even when he is instructing the reader how to be hard; how to confront one's sweet-sad past. The sweetness tears at one's heart, and it causes the reader to understand / relate to / validate one's own experiences. There is a sadness in it. There is also a profound, inescapable euphoria. Which one will you have? Which one will have you?

Vick's long poem causes one to realize that one must confront the layered nature of reality, and how it intercalates concrete memory markers, emotions, and flashes of ambivalence and perceptual perturbation.

Lost Chaperons takes the reader into images, and burrows into the edgy, unresolved tensions between memory and the ideal.

John Vick. 2009. Chaperons of a Lost Poet. Buffalo, NY: BlazeVOX. ISBN: 9781935402459.

Check out Rina Terry's review: http://www.leafscape.org/press1/v3n2/terry-review.html

The Psychic Sponge's Guide to Zeitgeistland

Merchants of Light

2009-04-30T22:03:00.006-05:00

I'm in Dumas, Texas, at the Window on the Plains Museum, and I'm thinking about Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis, written in England in 1623. It is a resolutely utopian work of thought and political philosophy, and I'm struck by the role of the "Merchants of Light" -- individuals whose job it is to traverse the world for intellectual treasures and to bring them back to share, and to create repositories of knowledge and learning.

YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wiv8q5pXtzM

Recommended sites:
http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com/2009/04/blending-mobile-technologies-handhelds.html

BLIGGLES MURPLY

2009-04-05T17:48:00.003-05:00

Podcast: Biggles Murply.
Winston, the chubby miniature pug, had eaten all the snacks in his dish. Bliggles Murply, the pug with floppy ears, still had kibbles and bits. So, Winston decided to eat them while Bliggles Murply was not looking.

Winston ate things so that the other dogs could not. He would eat their food even when he was not hungry and when he knew it would make them angry. Winston was not afraid of the other dogs’ reactions.

Perhaps Winston should have been afraid, though. Perhaps he should not have eaten Bliggles Murply’s food.

Bliggles Murply was magical.

Bliggles could read dogs’ minds. It was partly because he was a dog himself, and it was partly because he had sneaked into the kitchen when Great-Aunt Erlitza was brewing a potion and he lapped it all up while it was cooling in a bowl on the countertop.

It was supposed to make a person invisible, but, like all of Great-Aunt Erlitza’s potions, it did not work as intended. Instead of making bodies invisible, it made thoughts visible – but only to the person or the dog who happened to drink the potion.

“What’s mine is MINE!” thought Winston. For Bliggles Murply, Winston’s thoughts were like a bright green neon sign.

“You are a greedy little thing, aren’t you?” muttered Bliggles Murply.

Winston looked at Bliggles Murply. He snuffled, snorted, and drooled a bit as he smiled.

“What’s mine is MINE!” yapped Winston.He trotted over to Bliggles Murply’s blanket. Then he sat right down on top of it.

“Just saying it is yours does not make it yours. You are sitting on my blanket,” said Bliggles. “I’m going to tell Little Anna.”

“So what,” said Bliggles. “Little Anna is mine, too.”

“Well. I will fix that!” thought Bliggles Murply. Winston would learn the error of his selfish ways.

While Bliggles Murply thought about what he would do to teach him a lesson, Winston ran upstairs to Little Anna’s bedroom, scurried under her bed, and pulled out her left shoe. Winston chewed on it, the corner of his lip turning up in a big, fat smile,

In the meantime, Bliggles Murply decided that he would he would hide Winston’s dog dish. That would teach him that he could not eat everything in sight.

Winston ran down the stairs, Little Anna’s chewed shoe in his mouth.

“What is mine is MINE! Little Anna’s shoe is mine! She is mine!”

Bliggles Murply sat down, scratched his ear, and shook his neck until the dog tags rattled against the buckle of his collar. He was frustrated. Didn’t Winston realize that every cat and dog that met Little Anna thought the same thing? Everyone thought that Little Anna belonged to them, and them alone.

“If I had a dime for every dog, cat, rat, or human being who thought that they owned something just because they wanted it, I’d be rich,” thought Bliggles.

Time to teach Winston his lesson.

“I ate your food,” said Bliggles Murply to Winston.

To his surprise, Winston did not care. Instead, he started gnawing on the corner of the heel of the shoe.

“Hehe – you thought that you could take Little Anna away from me by stealing my dog dish. You are wrong. You were busy stealing the little prize. In the meantime, I grabbed the bigger prize. I have Little Anna’s shoe.”

“What kind of prize is that?” asked Bliggles Murply. “It will just make Miss Anna angry with you!”

“Which is bad? I don’t think so,” said Winston. “After all, she will pay attention to me. In fact, she won’t pay attention to anyone else while she is trying to teach me new tricks.”

“You mean tricks like sit and shake hands? You already know how to do that,” said Bliggles Murply.

“She doesn’t know that. She will think that she’s taught me all sorts of things. She will love me. I will own her.”

“Oh.” Bliggles Murply did not know what to think. Obviously, Winston was right.

“I own her” glowed in green neon over Winston’s head. Bliggles Murply growled low in his throat.

Winston snorted and smacked as he returned to chewing Little Anna’s shoe.

Bliggles Murply wondered: Should he chew up Little Anna’s other shoe? Should he start a fight with the cats? Should he make a mess in the kitchen?

No. It was too much work.

So. Bliggles Murply slunk off to his dog bed. Then he tried his best to ignore the neon green thoughts flashing over Winston’s head.

He hoped Great-Aunt Erlitza’s potion would wear off soon. People’s thoughts were too hard and conflicting to ever really get a clear picture.

FATS FURBLURGLURZ

2009-03-14T18:54:00.005-05:00

Podcast.
Miss Boots pranced around the yard. Fats Furblurglurz, the bully cat, was sneaking through the flowerbed. There was something about Miss Boots that made him angry. He did not like her perky little happy self.

He wanted to be her friend, but he did not know how to be her friend. All he knew how to do was to scratch and claw.

Fats Furblurglurz was big and awkward, and he did not have a smooth, glossy coat. His fur was rumpled, and there were small bald spots from where he had gotten into fights, and where he had rubbed the fur completely off from worrying himself when he felt especially angry. Things were worse after his mother’s leg was broken by a butcher who did not like her stealing sausages for her kittens. Fats felt angry all the time.

It felt good to be a bully. He liked the idea of scaring little animals who were small and weak.

Because Fats Furblurglurz was big and fat and loud, he was not very good at being sneaky. Miss Boots spotted him right away as he crashed through Aunt Erlitza’s bright red zinnias.

“I see you, Fats Furblurglurz!” meowed Miss Boots. “Stay away from the flowers! You are crushing them, and I know someone who will be very angry.”

“Is that right? Making someone angry makes me happy. In fact, it’s the only thing that makes me happy any more.”

Miss Boots leapt lightly to the top of the fence. She was very graceful. Her elegance made Fats Furblurglurz even angrier. She groomed herself daintily as she watched Fats continue walking through the flowers.

“You are a pretty thing, aren’t you?” snarled Fats. He wanted to bite Miss Boots right on her soft, white paw.

The sound of footsteps on the flagstones made Fats Furblurglurz aware that someone was approaching. Miss Boots could see it was Little Anna. She sat up very straight, waved her tail in the air, and meowed. “Hello, Miss Anna. Nice day for a walk!”

“Flatterer! Butt kisser!” snarled Fats Furblurglurz. “Stop trying to be her favorite cat! Let me have a chance!”

He said it under his breath, so no one heard it except for Miss Boots. Miss Boots glanced down and then smiled even more brightly.

“Little Anna, I love the skirt you are wearing. What a nice idea! Stars, flowers, and rainbows, with a matching rainbow scarf!”

It was more than Fats Furblurglurz could stand. He tried to leap onto the fence so he could bite and scratch Miss Boots, but he was too fat. He fell back into the garden, but instead of falling into the soft zinnias, he smashed into the rose bushes, which were full of thorns.

“Eeee yow!!! Ow ow ow – aeeiiii!” howled Fats Furblurglurz in pain.

Little Anna heard the fat cat cry in pain. She had a very soft heart and it made her feel very sad to hear him. She ran to the rose bush, where Fats Furblurglurz was attempting to pull thorns out of his tummy. A pink rose perched on the side of his left ear, and a stem of roses draped over his shoulder like a necklace.

“Oh you poor, poor cat. Oh my, you’re stuck with thorns." She lifted him delicately after carefully extracting the thorns. Fats Furblurglurz looked up at her with warm, grateful eyes.

“My, you are a very heavy cat, aren’t you?” Little Anna grunted as she tried to hoist him onto her shoulder like a baby.

Miss Boots looked down with dismay.

“Little Anna! You know, that fat cat tried to attack me,” she said fussily. Her voice was snippy with frustration. She crossed her paws in front of her and waved her tail.

“Did you ever try to be his friend?” asked Little Anna.

“Why no! Of course not! Fats Furblurglurz is fat. He is different. He does not have a pretty, smooth coat.”

Little Anna looked very sad.

“Miss Boots, you are a very pretty cat. Are you just as pretty inside?” asked Little Anna.

“Yes, I am,” said Miss Boots.

“I am glad you think so,” said Little Anna. “You are lucky. So, I am going to invite Mr. Furblurglurz for lunch.”

Miss Boots did not know what to say.

Little Anna held Fats Furblurglurz on her shoulder. She patted Fats’ rough fur. For the first time in a long time, Fats Furblurglurz did not feel angry. Instead, he began to purr.

Good Deeds Society: information about purchasing the book.

THEY WILL LIFT YOU UP

2009-01-01T17:21:00.007-06:00

The coffee shop where Tinguely had decided to get a venti decaf americano with 4 packets of Splenda and a solid splash of half-and-half was in a boutique-crammed shopping center adjoining the city's most exclusive hospital, a compact high-rise complex of wings and new additions dedicated to specialties unique to a chunk of territory encompassing northeast Oklahoma, southwest Missouri, southeast Kansas, and northwest Arkansas. It was not a quiet place. Med-evac helicopters landed regularly on the roof. The persistent chunk-chop-chop-chunk of blades cut large, anxious swathes of air.

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/medevac.mp3

It was New Year's Eve, and Tinguely was trying to finish a report her dad was waiting on. Her small laptop was perched in front of her.

She was having a hard time concentrating. She asked herself questions she really would prefer not to. Did blood drip from the door of the helicopter? Who paid for the medivac flight when the insurance would not? Why did all BlackBerry text messages have the same tone, causing everyone to look to their BlackBerry at each "booiiingoing"?

Tinguely took out a lime-green leather-bound notebook from her peach-toned leather tote bag and made a few notes on the smooth cream paper. Writing in her lizard green notebook was an extended metaphor for the quest to think oneself capable of responding to wisdom.

The idea that wisdom might exist at all in the here and now gave her pause. Could it? She preferred the blissed-out state of non-wisdom, non-thought. The image of lights encircling and imparting energy and joy. That was easier. It just was.

But, she had to write. The dull ache in her heart was pushing her to do that.

** I'm here -- in the intersection of the fight for life and the fight for loyal customers. All predicated on the idea that individual life actually matters.

Does the individual matter? At times, Tinguely sincerely doubted it. Her own individuality was problematic. She knew her role in life was to serve. Was it to serve her her fellow man? Her aging parents? The people she might meet who needed a cheerleader? They needed lifting up, or they needed the kind of structured interaction that caused them to think, to analyze, to create things that lived in the world. It was about making something you could perceive into something you could touch, right?

Now, the paradox came in when she knew she had to serve, but the individual she had to serve was inevitably part of a group.

Either way, Tinguely envisioned herself as a shiny, colorful hot air balloon. She did not think of herself in the role of a med-evac helicopter, as one hovered overhead. Why not? In a word, because she couldn't.

In her life, she lifted up people who were already healthy. They saw the rainbow silks, the heaving balloony body, panting to lift off the surface of the earth, and they smelled the fresh air, felt the cool air stir the hairs on their arms, and they simply could not get on board fast enough.

The balloon really did not take them anywhere, and it did not actually give them a view of the earth they did not already know. They felt, however, heightened senses of themselves. They loved looking out from the basket, listening to the "whoosh" of hot air, and listening to yard dogs bark frantically as they passed over neighborhood homes.

Later, Tinguely's balloon riders bounded across the grass to the parking lot, eager to share their experience. Tinguely loved seeing the satisfaction on their faces, their renewed sense of self, the restored sense of beauty and order in the world.

Yup, that's what I can do, thought Tinguely. That's what my "job" is -- at least in a purely existential sense, she thought. Instead of feeling satisfaction, Tinguely felt tired. Who cared about lifting her up? Who would lift Tinguely up?

Inevitably, it was Tiinguely who watched the colorful silk collapse to the grass, and then slowly scooped up the soft parachute silk.

Who fired the flames that would heat the air inside her heart and set her soaring?

No one. Everyone.

The question was almost not worth answering. Tinguely did not actually own hot air balloons. This was purely metaphorical. But, the role certainly fit Tinguely's public self.

Her private self was a different story altogether. She was no cheerleader, or pilot of a glorious hot air balloon. If anything, she had a small cave hidden away in a snaky, thorny arroyo, where she lit candles at night and prayed alone as she watched the stars and the moon move across the sky. She was alone in her cave. In fact, Tinguely pushed away anyone who tried to share her tight quarters. She accused them of being invasive, controlling, pushy. Or, she rationed the pleasure of their company in order to not want it too much. She did not want to crave what she could not have.

The cave was metaphorical as well. In reality, Tinguely was working for her dad. She was trying to focus on the report, but the med-evac helicopters distracted her. The sound made her tremble.

And here it was again. A helicopter hovered overhead. The sound was almost deafening. Tears rose in Tinguely's eyes, and she turned to the corner so she could discreetly cross herself, even though she was not Catholic. Somewhere overhead, someone was fighting for something they couldn't have; and they were craving what could never be.

They wanted to be happy, healthy, autonomous, desired / desirable, and, well, alive -- forever. The energy of the world compelled them to long for and crave what they could not have. Why? Continuance and continuity were the frightening obligations consciousness pushed down into humans -- as a race -- as a clutch of dreamy-eyed tribe-makers.

She expressed her thoughts to her dad. It was a quick call on her BlackBerry. It was not as reassuring as she had hoped. "Don't worry, Tinguely. You're only 30. When you're 45 or 55 and still have these thoughts and these patterns, you should start worrying. Right now -- well -- nothing to worry about. You just haven't met Mr. Right."

"Thanks, Dad. Yes. You're probably right," she said.

"Yes. Just keep your eyes on the prize."

"And what's that?" asked Tinguely.

"It's a super-giant oil field," he said. "You'll be rich. I have found one. The new methods are working. Just get the leases, line up the drilling contract, and we'll get started," said her dad.

"But, the price of oil is still in freefall. The price has declined 70 percent in 7 months."

"Think long run," said her Dad.

"Oh."

Another helicopter. Tinguely had to hang up. The noise was too loud. She thought about leaving and going back to where she was staying. There was a time when traveling would have pulled her out of her mood. That time was long in the past, though.

She was not Muslim, but she appreciated Ramadan. Perhaps her problem was that she had not gone through the purifying self-control of Ramadan -- the prayer, the self-abnegation, the fasting, the refusal to feast on food, bad thoughts, bad intentions -- for 28 days.

Boingooing.

Someone's BlackBerry was bleating. She glanced down at hers, even though she had turned hers off. She glanced at the floor. A wooden stir stick, a crumpled napkin, and a pricetag from the American Outfitter store next door clung to the space between the tile and the wall. X-Large. $34.50. A tiny ziplock bag containing a white pearl button. Clearly a shirt. A dress shirt. For a man? For a woman? A man was talking loudly into his cell phone. Tinguely thought about leaving before another helicopter flew overhead.

Boinnggoiing. Bleet!

Another BlackBerry from another table across the way. The messengers were all the same. The BlackBerry boinngoinngs were identical. The messages, though, would be different.

Repeating the thought, Tinguely scribbled into her notebook:

**The messenger is always the same. The message is always different. Even if the words are the same, the message is unique. Why? The context, the sender, the recipient, and the medium are all unique.”

Tinguely told her dad she often preferred the messenger (the BlackBerry, the emissary) to the actual communication.

"The messenger is service-oriented," she explained in her journal.

Would anyone ever read her words? She doubted it. She had lost track of how many journals she had left behind at exotic roast coffee bars and Whole Foods salad-by-the-pound shops.

Perhaps she'd go and drive by the river, listen to AM Talk Radio. The message was always the same, but in this case, the context and the receiver were always different. Sure, she was the same person, but the rant of the host would be mediated by the glorious glow of lights, the longing to share, and the bitter realization that she could not really share her thoughts with anyone. First, they may not be available. Second, they might twist her openness and desire to talk to play to their own agenda.

It was not that everyone had to have her best interests at heart, nor did they have to be in the service of her whims. However, in a world of equilibrium and balance, human invention and whole-heartedness, well, perhaps there might be a sweetness, a warmth of give and take. She could at least hope for that, right?

These thoughts stung. The feelings they elicited were needle-sharp, sad. Tinguely looked up at the hospital, toward the helipad. She envied the doctors and the nurses. Their activities were so engrossing, they probably did not have time to entertain painful thoughts. Further, the adrenaline surges would keep them in a zone...

**What is it like to have an all-absorbing job -- like, say, being a med-evac nurse or helicopter pilot? Their job was to lift people up. They lifted them to, they hoped, a very dramatic change -- snatching them from the bowels of certain death. It must be quite a rush to be lifted up by one's job as one lifts others up. When you leave the cocoon of your job (the helicopter, the emergency room, the emergency situation), how does the "real world" feel? Is it flat? Is it dreadfully open and empty? Does it leave you with a flatness, a lack of affect? Is it what occurs when all the adrenaline, endorphine, and other stimulating chemicals your body manufacturers have been used up?

It was New Year's Eve, and Tinguely renewed her attempts to motivate herself and finish the report her dad was waiting on.

It had been a sad, empty day. Now the day was almost over. Twilight crouched around the corner, helicopter blades made their chunky chopping sounds as they cut through the 20th-floor air to the helipad.

It was good to be alive, but conditions had been far from ideal for most people.

Tinguely realized, with a rather cottony thud, that everyone she knew would say "good riddance" to the year. The year had not been bad for her, just filled with rather unexpected and sometimes unwanted changes.

Booingoiing. Someone's BlackBerry went off. It was Tinguely's this time. She did not answer.

It had gotten to the point she did not like surprises. And, well, her BlackBerry was no helicopter. It was no soft, billowing hot air balloon. It would not lift her up. Or, well, more likely, it probably would not lift her up. Quite the contrary. It could crash her to earth. Catapult her into her cave. Better not to answer.

MONKEY’S PAW

2008-11-11T13:22:00.001-06:00

Full moon. Dark sky with light wispy clouds over the moon’s face of craters. Tinguely Querer was driving in the middle of the high plains. She heard yaps of coyotes and yowls of something feline. A dark, feral shadow lurked along the edge of the blacktop county road, with gravel shoulder. Was it a chupacabra? Tinguely shivered. Would the chupacabra smell her clammy, perfumed sweat, chase her down, feed on her blood, and to swallow her soul?

The cattle guard rattled as she drove over it to enter a dark, shambling ranch. She hoped it was the Freestoner Ranch. She had been looking for it and wanted to approach Mr. Freestoner to sign him up for an oil and gas lease.

podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/monkeyspaw.mp3

***************************************

“Monkey’s Paw or Death Ruby?” asked the man wearing a faded red bandanna, narrow boot-cut Wrangler jeans, a jean jacket, and rodeo belt buckle. He looked like the kind of cowboy you’d never see in a cowboy movie. He was too weather-beaten. His eyes were vaguely feral. His nose was all the way wild, totally coyote.

“If given the choice, and you HAD to make a choice, which would you go with?” he asked. “Monkey’s Paw or Death Ruby?”

“What are they anyway?” asked Tinguely. She had driven 7 hours, non-stop from central Oklahoma, and was in no mood for cryptic, Yoda-like pronouncements from a retro cowboy washed up on the beach-sands of time.

“And, imagine you can’t say no. You can’t refuse to choose.”

“Mr. Freestoner, I have the documents ready for you to execute. You’ll be glad you did this.” She wanted to get it over with. Drive to Amarillo. Get a room at a comfortable discount version of upscale hotels. The idea of lying on a soft mattress at a Hyatt Place or a Marriott Courtyard seemed more important than anything else at this point.

“Ma’am, Mr. Freestoner’s been dead for 10 years.”

“What?” Tinguely was not amused. “How did I miss that? I checked the records myself. I never make mistakes like this.”

“I’d say this was a pretty big one,” said the cowboy unsympathetically. “So. Ma’am. What would you do? Which would you choose?”

“Sir. I think I’d choose the one that would get me away from this place as quickly as possible.” He looked crestfallen. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. I’m just really tired. And, this means I’m going to have to go back and recheck records, reissue leases and drafts.”

“The Monkey’s Paw grants you three wishes, but each one comes with horrific price. You’ll pay. Yes, missy, you’ll pay. But, the Death Ruby’s no bargain. The Death Ruby will make you fabulously wealthy. But, all who touch it, except for the owner, die.”

“That’s easy,” said Tinguely, still annoyed. “I’d go with the Death Ruby. Good secret weapon. I’d be rich. Good way to get rid of the competition. ”

“For having such a sweet face, you sure have some mean thoughts,” said the cowboy.

“You haven’t heard the half of them,” said Tinguely. “Got any coffee around here? It was a long drive, and, to tell the truth, I’m in a bad mood.”

“You don’t say,” said the cowboy. “See you at the bunkhouse.”

“By the way, I’m not sure I quite buy it that the owner of a Death Ruby stays healthy. I would think that everyone would eventually be killed by the thing. Some people more quickly than others.”

“Think what you want,” said the cowboy. “I wouldn’t want to tangle with you, though.”

******************************************

"Sign up Freestoner. Then, keep going. See if you can get information. We've got a chance to lease Morrell's granddaughter's interest. I'd like to find the location, drill a new well, and test the formations. It will be good for all of us if it works out," said Dad.

"What makes you so sure?" asked Tinguely. Why not leave well enough alone? Something was wrong with the story she had been told. Something was behind the scenes, between the lines.

Tinguely pulled up to the rock and mortar ranchhouse. The clock on her dashboard said 4:40 pm. She took her keys out of the ignition of the Blazer she was driving. The keys felt cold and metallic in her hand.

She walked under a stunted sycamore tree. The ranch house and office were on the edge of a wash, or, as the locals called it, an arroyo. That meant there were a few trees.

Acquiescing to the cowboy’s insistence that she take a look around the ranch, Tinguely attempted to mind her manners. It was not easy.

Cattle shuffled slowly, mesmerized by the wind turbines spinning round and round, silently, slowly, both positive and negative, in direct response to the currents of cold air flowing down from the north in North America's most prominent wind corridor.

“If you’ll pour me a cup of coffee, I’ll work on it while you show me around,” said Tiinguely. She fully expected coffee the consistency of tar and the pH of battery acid. She was pleasantly surprised that it was fresh, tasted like espresso shots with hot water – café Americano.

She was in the middle of a ghost ranch. No one had the courage to admit what it was, but Tinguely Querer knew immediately.

At first, she wondered if the cowboy she was talking to was a phantom. She realized, after he drank boiled “cowboy coffee” with the grounds at the bottom of the mug, unrolled a yellowed newspaper from 1955, then started talking about how people had started buying up all the water rights to the Ogallala Aquifer, that there was really no way of knowing. His language hinted at transporting people from Mexico. He could be an apparition from the past. He could be from right here, right now. He could be a strange living outlier rafted in on a glacier of time. He could be the bones of a memory to be held by someone sometime in the future. Who could know?

“Have to admit, it’s nice to have company for a change,” said the cowboy. “Oh and by the way, my name’s Chance.”

“I’ll bet people called you “Lucky” when you were a kid,” said Tinguely. She realized she needed to sound folksy. Sometimes being down to earth came easily to her. Sometimes, though, it didn’t. At ths times, she seemed stand-offish or detached – something like a process server, paid for putting her emotions in a bucket by the door.

“Nope. I never was,” he said. “That was the cat. Now he was lucky.”

Tinguely smiled. If she could, she’d put her emotions, not in a box or a bucket, but in an air-sick bag. There was something warm about the breeze, although the air was chilly.

*************************************

“Dad, if you’re going to buy anyone’s mineral rights, or buy the surface so you can lease it out to wind turbine companies, you’re going to have to chum the waters.”

“Throw bloody, cut-up fish into the waters? Draw the sharks?” asked Dad, incredulously. “Why would we want to attract the sharks?”

“Because after they’ve fed, they’ll lead us to the live fish,” said Tinguely.

“Why would we want live fish?”

“Dad,” said Tinguely, suddenly exasperated. “I’m speaking metaphorically.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you.”

“What? Speak metaphorically?”

“Right. Don’t underestimate the ranchers and their families. You’re not giving them any credit for intelligence. More than one city slicker has found this out, much to their dismay. You’re about as city slicker as they come, Tinguely.”

“Dad I don’t know who or what it is that you see when you look at me and talk to me, but I’m telling you, it’s not at all the way I perceive myself. Give me some credit, Dad.”

“Do the people who chum the waters ever get bitten by the sharks they’re trying to trick?”

“No. Never,” said Tinguely, straightfaced. “When you baited a trap, did you ever catch anything you didn’t want?”

“Absolutely.” Dad paused. “I learned a lot from that.”

“Gotta go. The cowboy said he has some apple cobbler for dessert.”

“Thought you were going to spend the night in Amarillo.”

“The air is fresh and clear. Amazing.”

Clicked “end call” on her BlackBerry.

*******************************************************

Cattle silhouetted against the setting sun. The clouds were spectacular. An antique windmill used to bring water from the aquifer to the surface rattled and creaked in the wind.

Cattle moved together. They seemed to move toward the water. Then they moved en masse in another direction. They seemed to be moving away from the rays of orange-pink light shooting across the horizon.

Tinguely watched them, fell into a reverie. Then blinked. The cattle. Were they moving? Were they retreating? Tinguely could swear they were shuffling slowly, softly – backwards.

Blink.

A look down at the coffee cup. A quick rundown of what she had eaten. Mushrooms? No. Brownies? No. “Herbal” tea? No.

**************************************

There was something about the earth-colored farmhouse and the bright white wind turbines set along the fence line in the direction of prevailing breezes that gave Tinguely pause. A face flickered at one of the windows. Wisps of clouds cast spectres (or shadows) on the smooth prairie cover. Cattle grunted to each other. When the grass waved in the breeze, the clouds seemed to edge backwards, against the direction of the wind.

Tinguely braced herself. There was something here. It was making her uneasy.

The property was located in the shadow of the old XIT Ranch in the Texas Panhandle north and west of Amarillo. From 1885 to 1912, the ranch encompassed more than 3 million acres. There were around 300 windmills. 150,000 head of cattle grazed on the XIT Ranch lands. They were tended to by hundred of cowboys.

Ordinarily, Tinguely would not be anywhere near this part of the Panhandle, but supposedly a deep well had been drilled here during one of the booms, and the drill cuttings streamed oil, with strong odor of gas. The operator, Karlton Morrell, who had also owned a large part of the former XIT Ranch, had run out of money. The well cost a lot more than he had bargained for. But, it would pay off. He just needed to raise money. So, while he set out to raise money to continue drilling and to complete the well, Morrell had done his best to suppress the information. He had hoped to sell his remaining interest in the ranch and to then do the completion.

The poor guy never had the chance. His shiny black Ford pickup was found in a ravine. He was nowhere to be seen. In fact, he was never anywhere to be seen from that day on. He disappeared. Dead, most likely, said Dad. "Quite a shame. Morrell was a good guy. I always liked him."

The sky was the blue of childhood storybooks. The prairie switchgrass was the straw-gold of memory. The roof was the slate gray of long-forgotten dreams.

**************************************

“Say, Chance, what is it like living in a ranch house that was abandoned a hundred years ago?” asked Tinguely. It was dark. It would be a dangerous drive back to Amarillo, due to mule deer and coyotes. Road hazards.

“Nothing I’d recommend for someone like you,” he said.

“I can handle myself. I’ve done a lot of fieldwork. Had to. Geology degree,” said Tinguely. There was something about this wizened old cowboy that got under her skin.

“That’s why I would not recommend it. If you’ve ever done anything you wish you hadn’t in your life, you’re not going to have an easy time of it around here, once the moon’s up and the wind carries the voices.”

“What voices?”

“Coyote.”

“That’s nothing.”

“And the whispers. The whispers that come up from inside of you and swirl around your inner ear.”

“Okay, that’s enough for me for tonight.” Tinguely stood up. “Thanks, Chance. I’m heading back to Amarillo.”

“Yup. You are,” he said.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It’s where you started out, after all. You don’t have much choice in the matter, as far as I can tell.”

“Well, maybe. You’re right. It’s where I had my first job.” She noticed he had a smooth wooden box in his hand. He stood up and made a motion to give her the box.

“Well, Miss Tinguely, please take this with you. It’s a present from the ranch.”

“Wow. It’s beautiful. An antique cigar box?” The gift was so unexpected that Tinguely was taken by surprise. She was touched. The soft sentiment was quickly replaced by suspicion.

“What’s inside? A Monkey’s Paw? A Death Ruby?”

“Heck hek hek.” Chance’s cackle was not exactly a laugh. “Just a souvenir cigar box from old XIT Ranch. Thought you might like it.”

Tinguely accepted it and opened the lid gingerly, half-expected a bat to fly out. The box was empty. Inside, the wood was burned with the XIT brand.

“Thanks, Chance. You’re a nice guy. This was very generous of you.”

“Heck hek hek,” he laughed again. “Here’s a thermos of that coffee you liked so much. Watch out for the mule deer.”

She got back to the vehicle. The time: 11:45 am. Tingely checked her watch. Time: 10:45 pm. In the space of her vehicle, time had run backward. She looked at the second counter. Time was, indeed, going in reverse.

The Old XIT Cattle and Social Club

2008-11-09T19:57:00.006-06:00

The Old XIT (pronounced “excite”) Cattle and Social Club was meeting in a small town southwest of the small town of Cactus, Texas.

Tinguely Querer looked at the announcement in the local paper and wondered what that the members of the club did for fun. Bingo? Monopoly? Horseshoes behind the barn? Knife throwing? Tarantula hunting?

Podcast: Downloadable mp3 file

She wondered what it would take to join, and if it would be okay to join and attend just one meeting.

It was hard to predict when she would be in the Texas Panhandle and precisely where she’d be. After all, the Panhandle was a large place, the same size as eight Rhode Island’s.

*****************************************************

Back home in Oklahoma, she shared her thoughts with her mother.

"I would never join a Cattle and Social Club," said Tinguely. "Out of principle. I don't think that animals that are about to be slaughtered have much in common with people looking for love."

"Oh, you don't, do you?" Tinguely's mother had reappeared after a long absence. Once back in town, she gave Tinguely a call, and they met at the local Starbucks. Mother drank a green tea frappuccino. Tinguely had a non-fat chai latte. Tinguely munched on granola and a whole-grain roll with maple almond butter while Mother feigned maternal concern.

Tinguely was not buying the maternal concern routine. There were too many episodes in the past, too much abandonment – not intentional, but in pursuit of a higher truth. Abandonment of one’s children and pets was not an easy thing to confront, so Mother had learned the art of deflection and rationalization. She also told some whoppers of tall tales.

The latest was when Mother told Tinguely she was on a cruise, when in reality, Mother was at a Christian version of a Hindu Ashram in northeast New Mexico n a retreat with her Bible study group that focused on healing and praise.

When Tinguely learned that part of the retreat involved locking each individual in an isolation chamber, she was horrified. The women stayed for three days and three nights and logged their thoughts, visions, and hallucinations in notebooks with waterproof pages.

All Tinguely could think of was the medieval diarist and mystic, Margery Kempe, who chronicled her pilgrimage to the Holy Land. If one read between the lines, one could see that Margery had to have been an absolute pain to travel with. Her visions tended to portend great calamity and personal discomfort. Mother tended to have similar visions – crashing planes, danger on certain routes, food contamination, evil spirit-infested hotels, and horribly aching feet, riddled with corns, bunions, and blisters.

“Mother.” Awkward pause. “It’s nice to see you.” Tinguely tried to keep her face expressionless. She did not want to give Mother an entrée into her private life, or an opportunity to express opinions about Tinguely’s weight, hair, and clothes.

Mother could be scary-skinny, and she could be the kind of person you’d see on the first row of an Armani style show or in a PRAISE NOW tele-evangelist ministry broadcast. Mother was a true believer.

One would think that being in faith healing circles would give Mother a positive, "I believe in miracles" outlook on life. It did, but it also engendered a deep cynicism about human nature as it existed in its unmediated "fallen" state.

“Don’t you think that they’re just looking for trouble? After all, both end up in the same place. The only difference is in how they grind the flesh, and who consumes whom. That’s why I’m a vegetarian.”

“And why you’ve never remarried,” added Tinguely.

“Well, my point, Tinguely, is this question: Don’t you think the whole endeavor is fraught with a morbid fascination with hopelessness?”

"No, Mother, I don't. I think that the cattle are hanging onto life. All they want to do is breed in hopes of cheating death. That’s not hopeless.”

"I think you're giving those randy steers a lot of credit, dear," said Mother.

"Maybe," said Tinguely. She continued. "But Mother, let's look at the other side. The Social Club side. People looking for love are something else entirely. Renunciation of the individual self. At least that's how South Americans put it. If you renounce your individual sense of self, aren't you essentially obliterating yourself? Your identity?"

"You've put your finger on the slaughterhouse connection, Tinguely," said Mother. "Feedlot cattle. Sad men and women willing to erase themselves if only ... well, if only they can feel love - even if only for a moment."

"Mother. That idea makes me want to weep. It's almost saying that the human condition is worse than that of doomed, soon-to-be-slaughtered cattle. People are willing to "self-slaughter" if they can have a moment -- no matter how fleeting -- where they feel a warm, loving embrace -- an existential acceptance that is, well, unconditional."

"I don't know if I'd go that far. Let's just say that the core "pivot point" of existence -- for cattle -- for human beings -- revolves around sex-death equations followed closely by an 'if I die, you'll love me more, and then you'll take my energy to build a huge, better world" equation. I don't think it's very healthy,
Tinguely."

“What’s it like to be in an isolation chamber for three days and three nights?” asked Tinguely, suddenly bold. She never knew Mother to have such insight into the human condition.

“I slept a lot.” said Mother.

Some things would never change.

************************

A couple of weeks later, Tinguely found herself in a small town southwest of the small town of Cactus, Texas, still curious about the XIT Cattle and Social Club.

She went to her first meeting, which was in an old rock and mortar building perched on the side of a steep hill that overlooked a small canyon. They sat on the patio, which was draped with strands of all-white Christmas lights. The air smelled of sage and rain.

“We were going to have square dancing lessons, but our instructor called in sick,” said a woman in her late 20s who was dressed in a gingham prairie dress.

Tinguely thought she looked like a grad student in anthropology or an escapee from an isolationist polygamous cult. Tinguely’s first impression did not lead her astray.

“Hi. I’m Katwell Dantzen. I’m getting a master’s degree in ethnology, and I’m doing my thesis on folk dances. I am really sorry we aren’t having square dancing. I was really looking forward to it,” she said. She extended her hand. “Are you new?”

“Uh. To this, I am,” said Tinguely. “Where are the cattle?”

“The cattle are not actually invited. We just talk cattle when we can’t talk about love,” said a husky man with a kind face. “I’m Roy Anguster.”

“So that means that pretty much all we talk about is cattle. Deworming, growth hormones, antibiotics, putting the weight on quickly and safely,” said another man, leaner, with bushy white hair. He had a slightly less pleasant expression on his face.

Tinguely guessed he was embittered by the constant cattle talk. Love would spice it up a bit. As would square dancing.

“Say, Katwell. Don’t know some moves? You’re getting an advanced degree in this stuff, after all. You even have the costume for it. Even though I’ve never seen a lady wear cowboy boots with a long prairie girl dress,” said Roy.

The white-haired man with the slightly embittered face answered his BlackBerry.

“Hello. Hello? Can you hear me now? Bad signal. What? I’m not anywhere. I am just down here at the Cattle Club.” Katwell was talking to Roy about why she mixed boots with skirts. Tinguely tittered lightly to herself, unable to keep back the chuckles.

The man’s face clouded as he continued to speak on his BlackBerry.

“No one. It’s just the same old Cattle Club. Same as ever. Who am I with? Cattle club. I’ll be okay. Don’t worry about me. Woops. Bad signal. You’re cutting out. I’ll call you when I get in.”

“Your voice sounded really guilty just then,” pointed out Tinguely.

The guy smiled. His face softened and he seemed approachable, suddenly.

“That was my daughter. She doesn’t trust me a lick. Don’t know why that is. She always thinks I’m on the verge of getting corralled by some woman who is up to no good.”

“How do you know that isn’t the case?” asked Tinguely. “Maybe you are.”

She smiled. This was fun.

“She doesn’t know it, but I make myself sound guilty on purpose. It drives her crazy,” he said.

“Kind of serves her right, doesn’t it,” said Tinguely.

“Give a person enough rope and enough time, and they’ll tie themselves the fanciest noose you’ll ever see,” smiled the man. “By the way, I’m Potter.”

“As in Harry Potter?” asked Tinguely.

“Close. Potter Harris,” he said. Tinguely smiled. Images of cattle being levitated, flying on broomsticks, and goose-stepping while mooing in unison along a line of giant wind turbines flooded her mind.

“Looks like the place is shutting down for the evening.” A woman was turning off the Christmas lights, shutting the doors.

“Will you be back next week?” asked Potter.

Roy and Katwell chimed in, “Hope to see you again sometime, Tinguely.”

“Maybe. I never know. I’m always in different places, it seems,” said Tinguely.

*****************************

“They didn’t talk about love, and they didn’t really even talk about cattle,” said Tinguely to Mother. She was able to get a good signal, so she had called her mother’s home phone. Surprisingly, Mother had picked up.

“Will you go back?” asked Mother.

“They did not really do anything. All they really did was talk about what they might have done, but couldn’t do. That was the square dancing.”

“Sounds like a normal sort of meeting to me. Isn’t that the way people really communicate? They hardly ever get around to being direct and asking for and getting what they really want.”

Tinguely reflected for a moment.

“Who knows what he or she really wants anyway?” she asked Mother.

“Maybe that’s why it’s so much easier to give people what they demand, rather than demanding something yourself,” said Mother. Her voice was starting to break up.

“Too much effort,” said Tinguely. “Well, have to go now, Mother.”

She ended the call, then called to the front desk of the hotel where she was staying to request another set of bath soaps, and then to complain that the wireless Internet signal was low, and that they had given her a handicapped room instead of a normal one. She always ran into or tripped on the fold-down shower seats. They always seemed to have mildew on them. Who designed these things anyway? Who actually thought about thinking from the handicapped person’s point of view?

The woman at the front desk dealt with Tinguely’s complaints with good humor. “Guess you got lucky this time,” she said.

“Yes, if my luck continues to hold, maybe we’ll run out of hot water, or I’ll cut myself shaving my legs,” said Tinguely. How did a person who was partially paralyzed or with mobility problems shave her legs?

Getting access. A handicapped person was basically all about positive self-actualization. They thought about how they could gain access and mobility.

The non-handicapped person’s perspective: Losing access. Losing contact. Losing hope of transformative action.

The XIT Cattle and Social Club held the answers, and Tinguely sensed it. She just wasn’t sure if she had the courage to find out.

Recommended!
http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com

Stephen Downes' OL Daily http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm

EduCause Review: http://connect.educause.edu/er

IncSub: http://incsub.com/

Tom Beckett's blog: http://willtoexchange.blogspot.com/

Dusie -- http://www.dusie.org/

Rochelle Owens' Early Poems (at light&dustbooks)
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lowens1.htm

Bear Trap

2008-10-25T13:46:00.005-05:00

Tinguely Querer decided to take a few weeks off between contracts and to play the stock market. Granted, it was in the middle of a bear market of historic proportions, but that did not deter Tinguely.

Her last contract had been to buy mineral interests for elderly people in the Texas Panhandle. Most lived in nursing homes and and appreciated the help. She had been working out of Caprock, Texas, situated between two large wind turbine farms and a feedlot.

Having signed a short-term rental agreement on a house in the town’s newest subdivision, Tinguely decided to stay. It was convenient, and she would be comfortable as she figured out how to profit from panic selling, fear, and raging bears. Plugging in her laptop and G3 card, Tinguely could get high speed Internet and follow the market, even in the most barren patches of the High Plains.

“All the big money was made during bear markets,” said someone on the radio.

Tinguely supposed one could say that about the Black Death, Plague, and tsunamis as well. Someone pries the molars and the gold fillings from skulls and, with a little bit of pluck, start a jewelry shop. When life hands you lemons… get a pair of pliers.

It was a stretch. Tinguely would be the first to admit she knew little or nothing about analyzing market trends and selecting stocks. The work she was doing for her dad and for other clients had to do with oil and gas leasing and environmental evaluations. As the business soared, Tinguely started to feel a firm sense of identity.

Her dad, on the other hand, saw the other side. His friends and old business partners had been gutted by margin calls. Some lost up to $2 billion dollars of net worth in a single day. Now, the companies they had worked so hard to build and own a stake in, would suddenly change. Instead of being a major stockholder, Dad’s friends would be onlookers. The vultures would be in the driver’s seat. Tinguely could tell it bothered Dad.

“Watch yourself, Tinguely. Don’t get too cocky. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. You’re young. I’m not,” said Dad.

Tinguely listened, but the words did not register. His experience was not hers.

“I don’t feel sorry for them. In fact, I’m glad I did not own stock in their companies. They were narcissistic. When they bought shares in their own companies using borrowed money, what did that really mean, Dad? They hoped to profiteer on insider information. Instead, they devastated lots of people’s portfolios,” she said.

“Easy to gloat until it happens to you.”

“I’m planning to build shareholder value.” Tinguely’s personal boom had made her bold. She could invent herself. After all, she had already done it successfully.

Constructing an identity was on her mind. Now was the time to come up with a company name, or at least a concept name for the types of services she provided.

A bold name for a newly bold woman. The idea made Tinguely laugh. She knew, in her heart of hearts, she had been feeling vulnerable and unsettled since turning 30 a few months ago.

“By the way, Tinguely, can you meet with our client in Amarillo tomorrow?”

“Sure,” said Tinguely.

***************************

The drive from Caprock to Amarillo was long and dull, but 24-7 talk radio made it bearable.

FOX NEWS, FAIR AND BALANCED: The market took another apocalyptic plunge today, the Dow sinking 500 points while the President was giving a pep talk about the economy.

Rumors are out there that when the derivative hedges come due, the market will really dive, since derivatives represent – if you believe what the experts are saying -- 16 times the world's GDP. More than one person has already said it. When the derivatives tank, the Illuminati will take off their masks, and the Reptilian Aliens, who have been controlling the Illuminati (and the Freemasons) for the last three centuries will take over.

On the other hand, perhaps Armageddon isn’t just around the corner after all. In the last hour of trading, the market soared and the Dow closed 400 points up

*********************************
Climbing vines, creepers --
Our steel fences are overwrought:
gold melts, money burns.

(Old Dow Jones haiku, with kireji)

*********************************

The only trouble her plan was she could not sleep. Between LouLou, her large, noisy parrot, and the next door neighbor’s incessantly barking pugs, Tinguely was a wreck. Yet again, it was 3 am and she was nowhere near being able to sleep. Neither was LouLou.

“Play the ponies.” It was an unwelcome intrusive thought. It made no sense. There weren't any ponies around. Besides, Tinguely didn’t like the idea of horse-racing. Never trust a horse. It knows it can be shot if it breaks a leg.

***********

Tinguely met her neighbor while picking up Diet Coke cans someone thrown onto the front yard.

Her neighbor, Beryllium Markham, had flown in on her own small plane to check out her investments in the windfarms north and south of town. She was a lean woman with chiseled features, somewhere in her mid-50s. Her dark hair was pulled back in a chignon. Her stunning eyes were enhanced by eyeliner and lash-thickening mascara, coupled with smooth, flawless skin. She was prosperous and not very approachable.

Holding a copy of the Wall Street Journal in one hand, Beryllium smoothed her hair with the other. Beryllium explained that over the last several years, she had been also workin as a stock broker who did limited investment banking as well.

“Perhaps you can give me some stock tips,” said Tinguely.

“That sounds like a profoundly bad idea,” said Beryllium. Tinguely decided to take a different approach. She wondered if Beryllium were related to the pioneering female pilot, Beryl Markham.

“Did you ever live in Africa? In Kenya? Fly planes there? Your mom?” asked Tingeley.

“My great aunt. She was Beryl Markham. I’m Beryllium,” said the pilot.

“Nice,” said Tinguely. But, who would name their child Beryllium? Might as well be “Bear.” Beryl was a mineral. Beryl occurred in many forms, including emerald and aquamarine. Beryl was beryllium aluminum cyclosilicate. Beryllium was the key element. The attributes of beryllium included extreme heat resistance.

“I think I’d go with being called Beryl. Doesn’t sound so … uh… technical.”

She was going to add “scary strong,” but decided that was uncalled for. Beryllium was silent. Then she looked at Tinguely. Her eyes glittered unnervingly.

“You can call me whatever you want,” Beryllium paused. “The global economy’s on the ropes right now.”

“Who threw cans on your yard?” asked Tinguely. Instead of Diet Coke, someone had thrown Budweiser beer cans into Beryllium’s driveway. It looked very odd to have ten empty beer cans on a concrete slab.

"I don’t know. Let’s get back to the main question. The best way to make money these days is to do nothing. Book the money you would have lost if you had “followed your gut” as a gain. It’s all paper anyway. But, if you just have to gamble and lose, why not invest in gold?" she said. She paused. Tinguely’s face was puzzled.

“All the talk show radio hosts recommend gold,” said Tinguely.

Beryllium looked stern. “Tinguely, that was a joke."

"Did you know that most of the world's financial dynasties were born in bear markets?" pointed out Tinguely.

"Did you know that most aviation accidents are with small single-engine planes?" asked Beryllium.

"You fly a single-engine plane, right?“ asked Tinguely. "Death wish or desire for speedy straight-line travel?"

"I hate talking in metaphors,” said Beryllium.

Her mouth made a straight line. Beryllium’s point of view was alien to Tinguely, who was a believer in "win-win." Further, for Tinguely, "straight-line travel" was anathema. She preferred to circle around until she had surveyed all the terrain at least a dozen times – close-up, far away, and sideways.

On the other side of Tinguely’s house arose the sound of two pugs barking.

“Anyway, I got my start in crop-dusting,” said Beryllium. Her smooth, dark hair flew away from the tight chignon.

“The chemicals are bad for animals, right? What would happen if, say, a couple of pugs were frisking about a field that was getting sprayed?”

Beryllium ignored Tinguely’s question.

"So you asked if I have a death wish? I always check the weather forecast before filing my flight plan. There’s your answer."

"What is that supposed to mean?" asked Tinguely. She picked up a Diet Coke can and tried crushing it in her hands. She failed. "Who's throwing these things on my lawn? Yesterday, there were two. Today there are four."

"Someone's been throwing the Dallas Morning News on my lawn. I don't want it."

“I’m thinking about buying “distressed stock” that billionaires are having to unload when they get a margin call. I think there are some good deals out there. I read that one guy had to sell his stock that had once been worth $75.00 for $12.64. It’s a good company. Everyone says it will go back up to at least $50 within a year.”

“Vulture,” muttered Beryllium under breath.

Beryllium’s eyes looked hard and glassy as she said it. Not precisely like emerald. They seemed more alive than that. Tinguely thought of the eyes of a gecko or a Komodo dragon. She shuddered.

**********************************************
We all need an oracle. We need a soothsayer we project our own thoughts on so we can have some confidence in ourselves. Some people travel to Delphi. Some people frequent small storefronts with purple neon lights and a tarot deck poster in the window. Others call their old buddy who invariably buys high and sells low, ask him for advice, patiently endure his explanations of his “method,” and then do the opposite. We all need an oracle.

**********************************************
It was another long, sleepless night. Tinguely was trying to read herself to sleep. It had been a fruitless day of trying to figure out which companies were tanking the fastest and hardest, and which billionaire owners might be vulnerable.

LouLou was preening herself and practicing her new phrase: "Wall Street Week: After the Break! Wall Street Week: After the Break!"

Tinguely glanced up from the book of Indian devotional songs to Shiva that she had been reading. Raised a Baptist prohibited from dancing or having carnal thoughts, Tinguely found the idea of a deity who had erotic fantasies about Radha, a mortal cowherdess, to be disturbing, but weirdly irresistible.

She walked over to LouLou’s cage and put a dark towel over it. She cooed to the parrot soothingly.

“LouLou. Lovely LouLou. Help me figure out how to get in on the margin call fire sales,” she said.

LouLou squawked ungraciously. Tinguely changed her voice.

"Come, gentle night, — come, loving black brow'd night. Pay no worship to the garish sun,” mumbled Tinguely. It was a line from Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet.

"After the Break! Wall Street Week!" squawked LouLou.

Tinguely sighed heavily and turned on the television. LouLou was a great companion, but noisy.

It was an infomercial. Tanned, with spiky brown hair, a button-down denim shirt, and khaki pants, a smugly overconfident spokesperson opened the door of his $80,000 sedan.

Infomercials were not her television viewing material of choice. But, since becoming addicted to forensic crime dramas, Tinguely had decided to only allow herself to watch C-SPAN and Infomercials. C-SPAN was airing a rerun of last week's filibuster in anticipation of a vote to tax Medicare benefits.

Tinguely had already emailed her Congressmen to express her approval of the plan.

From her cage near the east window of Tinguely's bedroom, LouLou ruffled her feathers and noisily cracked open an almond with her beak. Next door, the neighbor's Westminster Kennel Club pugs, Jackson Heights and Jillian Lowes, were barking frantically.

Never mind it was 2:30 am.

"Call within the next 15 minutes, and you can be a Registered, Certified DAY TRADER. In 24 hours, you'll be making trades, pouring the foundation of your new mansion. When the time comes and you want to buy your own island, we can help you with that, too."

Tinguely grabbed her purse with her credit cards, pulled out her cell phone and dialed the number. Jackson and Jillian appeared to be in mortal combat with an opossum, which was probably standing on the wooden fence, doing little more than baring its teeth and hissing.

Tinguely flashed on to an inspiration. Pharmaceuticals. The kind people get addicted to. Would that be a good stock to buy with leveraged funds?

Companies that made cheap caskets for all the increased deaths due to people unable to afford proper medical care, nutrition, prenatal care? This seemed like a winner.

In her corner still alert under the dark towel, LouLou cracked more nuts, ruffled her feathers again, and practiced a couple of her favorite sounds and phrases: first, the Friday Noon Tornado Siren Test, and second, Tinguely’s recorded voice on her answering machine greeting.

LouLou’s squawky parrot voice emanated: "Sorry can't answer. Sorry can’t answer."

***************************

It was morning and yet again, someone had thrown four empty Diet Coke cans on Tinguely’s lawn. Beryllium was in her own yard, eyeing a soggy Dallas Morning News.

“Knowing there will be junk on the lawn is about the only thing that stays the same these day," commented Tinguely. “Hey, I made some money on Budget Casket stock.”

“How? Surely there weren’t a lot of margin calls with the owners of that stock,” said Beryllium.

“Don’t know. I sold short,” said Tinguely.

“Whatever for? Oh never mind. I got it,” said Beryllium. “Shareholders see the future. Cremations are cheaper, hence no need for a casket – not even a cheap one from Budget Casket.”

“Well, it went down all right.”

Beryllium was changelessly gorgeous, with elegance and grace. Tinguely felt a bit intimidated. She looked down at the crushed cans in her hands.

“I guess I should make some sort of sculpture out of these,” she said, thinking of Jean Tinguely, her namesake. If she truly followed his pattern, they would self destruct in amusing ways. Tinguely didn’t feel capable of doing anything amusing these days.

“That would be environmentally friendly. Not a bad idea,” encouraged Beryllium. “I am very happy with the wind turbine projects. It seems to be a way to take the negative energy and chaos from the environment and turn it into something all of us can use.”

“Humanitarian?” asked Tinguely.

“Absolutely not. With all the changes and chaos in our wind, weather, and population patterns, wind turbines reintroduce order into Nature. They make the wind go in a certain way. They make thinga move together. We can see it. It’s a mechanical choreography of unruly forces of Nature. Heaven knows we need it.”

“You’re the one who has been throwing Diet Coke cans on my lawn!” It was an intrusive thought, articulated because of sleep deprivation.

Beryllium ignored her.

***************************

“Dad. I’m thinking about buying stocks. Paterfamilias Bank. Kerr-McGee Forest Products. American Motors. deChatville Mines. Mohawk Mills. Samson Equities. Ford Motor Company.

“Where are you getting these stock tips?” asked Dad. “Some of those companies haven’t been around for 50 years.”

“Where did they go?” asked Tinguely.

“Mergers. Acquisitions. Slow exsanguination in a bear trap.”

“What?”

“It’s what happens when the market goes down.”

“That seems obvious, Dad. But these are household names.”

“What have you been reading? LOOK Magazine from 1953?”

“Uh. How did you know?”

“Are you getting enough sleep?”

“Will you take LouLou and the next door neighbor’s pugs?”

Tinguely hung up. In the space of a conversation, the pillars of something stable and strong had vaporized. The roof was falling in. The question was, the roof of what?

*****************************
When everyone else is flying high, fly low.
When everyone else is flying low, fly high.
It’s what bush pilots and WWI Sopwith Camel fighter pilots liked to say. The Sopwith Camel fighters liked to add, “Stay agile, even if your engines sputter and you think you’re cutting out.”

*****************************

“I’m all for taxing Medicare payments,” said Tinguely. She was explaining her rationale to her dad. Her dad had just turned 72.

“What’s that?” Her dad sound testy. He hated getting into these sorts of conversations with Tinguely on his cell phone during prime time. Nights and weekends were okay. Mid-week at 3 in the afternoon was not.

“Tell me. In a nutshell.”

"If you had to pay taxes on your MRIs, CT-scans, PET-scans, nano-tube imaging diagnostics, exploratory surgeries, exotic animal-skin grafts, and fill-in-the-blank-oscopies, you'd probably think twice before having all that unnecessary stuff done, right?"

Her dad had just returned from his annual checkup with a fistful of orders for tests and labwork. Silence. Her dad did not respond.

"The worst part is, the imaging is so precise these days, they'll always find something. Then they'll do expensive laser surgery, just to avoid a lawsuit later, just in case the anomaly - probably a stray lump of fat -- that the radioactive nano-tubes caused to light up, might turn out to be something serious," said her dad.

"Medicare should pay you NOT to take their tests. You're just another mark," said Tinguely. "Heaven help you if you're living in a government-subsidized nursing home and get a bad set of tests."

"That's right." agreed her dad. "Soylent Green."

Soylent Green was her dad's favorite movie. Perhaps it was not his actual favorite movie, but it was the one he felt best depicted the way we would be living life in the very near future. In it, because of food and resource shortages, when people reached a certain age, they were euthanized. As they entered the chamber that took them to their final reward (being ground up and processed into a uni-food called "soylent green") uniformed waitstaff asked them politely, "What music would you like with your lethal injection?"

"Never let yourself or your kids get snookered into selling all your assets so you'll get "free" state-paid nursing home care," continued Tinguely's dad.

"Yup. Soylent Green."

The movie Tinguely felt most depicted the near future was "A Clockwork Orange," but that was partially she had studied Russian and liked the Russian-inflected Cockney slang, and partially because she half-expected the United States to announce a corporate merger with Russia, with the new capital being Anchorage, servicing 25% of the world's remaining oil reserves, where were conveniently located in the Arctic.

The infomercial caught her attention again. "Bear markets are mansion-makers. Dynasties."

*******

Beryllium Markham was back. The Diet Coke cans had reappeared on the lawn. Beryllium seemed to have ignored the fact that Tinguely thought she was throwing them on her lawn.

Beryllium’s lawn was pristine. There was a dew-sogged Dallas Morning News, though. Tinguely wondered cynically if Beryllium had also thrown newspaper on her own lawn and then soaking it with a water hose.

She must have seen Tinguely picking up Diet Coke cans. Beryllium’s stained-glass door opened. She emerged, looking smooth and rested in slender black pants, a snowy-white long-sleeved blouse with bell sleeves, and slender patent black-leather boots. She wore a garnet necklace and matching earrings. Her fingernail polish had a salamander pattern.

Tinguely was wearing rumpled jeans, a faded Hawaiian t-shirt with silk-screened birds of paradise, and Cole-Haan flats. Her hair was wet.

“Who’s doing this?” asked Tinguely.

“How’s your little stock market business coming along? Pick the flesh off any once-prosperous investors lately?”

“No,” replied Tinguely glumly. “I always find out about them after they’ve already sold their stock due to margin calls and leveraged financing coming due.”

“Well. Isn’t that a shame.” Beryllium held the soggy newspaper disdainfully between thumb and index finger.

“What’s a derivative hedge?” asked Tinguely.

“Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.”

Tinguely put the four empty Diet Coke cans into a plastic Lowe’s Food Store bag and sighed. If truth were told, she was lonely.

Beryllium parted her lips in her her glittering reptilian smile. Her lips were glossed the color of rubellite tourmaline.

********************************
Bears that dance are bears that bite. That was an old gypsy saying. They should know. They had perfected the art of the con where you use a dancing bear instead of a pick-pocketing spider monkey wearing a little jacket and a tiny bellman’s cap. “Dance with the bear!” Women in oversized t-shirts and stretch pants along with teenagers with “soldier boy” saggy pants would give it a try. The moment they jumped back from the suddenly snarling bear, their wallets and purses magically disappeared.

Bears that dance are bears that bite. If you doubt it, go to St. Petersburg. Take a stroll along Nevski Prospekt along the banks of the Neva River.

********************************

The next few days were quieter than before.

Beryllium flew off to parts unknown.

Whoever was throwing Diet Coke cans onto Tinguely’s yard decided to give her a break from picking up litter. The pugs barked only at night, and LouLou started sleeping during the day.

Tinguely got in the habit of drifting off to sleep sometime after lunch and awakening as the sun started to sink in the sky. During that time, she had vivid dreams. They were so odd that she remembered every one. She recorded each one in a journal.

The afternoon dreams seemed to have no pattern: thunderstorms with hail containing diamonds, dogs wearing silk booties, mechanical rats, a Humvee bearing a skull and crossbones pirate flag, quartz crystals from Hot Springs, Arkansas, a girl stepping out of a vintage Pepsi-Cola poster and coming alive, a small girl in a pink and green polka-dotted tricycle pedaling in tighter and tighter concentric circles. Finally, a Ring of Fire.

Thinking of the mechanical rats dream, Tinguely bought a contract to deliver a block of Victor Mousetrap stock.

She was not quite sure how buying and selling futures worked. Perhaps because she did not know, she made a tidy profit.

The Pepsi-Cola dream seemed too obvious. So Tinguely bought stock in Antiques Road Show. It zipped up during an afternoon surge, before plunging to a new low. Tinguely got lucky. She sold high.

As her sleep deprivation started to lift, Tinguely started to notice strange things about the transcribed dreams. The fragments of her dreams no longer seemed to correspond to company names, but they were coming together in two- and three-word clusters.

“Maybe it’s an omen, LouLou,” said Tinguely. She had let LouLou out of her cage, and the parrot was now contentedly nuzzling Tinguely’s arm. “Maybe these are stocks I should be buying.”

“Doggie Silk Booties. Diamond Hailstorm. Jolly Roger Humvee. Tricycle Toddler. The Sound of Sunlight.”

Tinguely paused.

“Hmm. I don’t quite get it. Well, with all the IPOs, who knows. Are they the titles of songs to be released? Or movies? Television series? BioPics? Reality TV?”

Tinguely logged into her account on her computer and sold stock with Apple (iTunes) and Disney Studios. She did not actually own stock in either company.

“After the Break! After the Break!” squawked LouLou. She took a few steps across the table, cocked her head and looked at Tinguely. Tinguely smiled.

“Crazy bird. You are too much. Want some dried cranberries?”

In response to the cranberries, LouLou warbled and sounded oddly like a pigeon.

Tinguely wrote word combinations based on her dreams in her journal: “Crystal Rainbow Bracelet. Tiny Teddie. Poodle Bear Winkie. Oz Wonker. Celebrity Daisy. Fight My Fire.” The dream-names were getting weirder and weirder.

Language was self-destructing. Was it amusing? Tinguely gazed on the pile of Diet Coke cans from her front yard. Unexpectedly, tears came to her eyes.

Not only were corporate identities melting, the language itself was encoding itself in a new way. Unleashed from their moorings on Wall Street and their once-solid footprint in the consciousness of the average American consumer, the things that had meaning no longer carried the same meaning. Reification processes once powered by image, advertising, code were now de-reification processes. This was no hard-charging bull market, where identity invented itself every day and then soared heavenward. This was a bear market. Entities and identities disintegrated.

For some people, the experience was weirdly liberating. And yet it could not help but reinforce existential isolation and a sense that discourse’s links to meaning had broken down. Perhaps this time for good.

Tinguely was not sure at all what to do with the information. She checked the stocks she was to deliver. They had plunged with the Dow, which was down 250 points. She purchased Apple (iTunes) and Disney Studios.

She used the stocks she had just purchased to fulfill her commitment to deliver the stocks she had sold earlier in the day (at a higher price). It was a neat profit. Her hands were sweating.

“Dad. I have to learn how to sell short the right way,” said Tinguely.

“Don’t do it. You’ll fry,” said her dad.

“I don’t care. I’ve got two weeks to make a mark. Bucks. It’s going to happen.”

“Keep your powder dry.”

“Okay. So help me figure out what these omens mean. There’s enough in it for all of us if we get it right,” said Tinguely.

“Gambling is addictive, you know.”

“This is not gambling This is getting in touch with cosmic energies,” said Tinguely.

“I think you need to talk to someone. You’ve been spending too much time alone.”

“I’ve got LouLou.”

“Exactly,” said her dad.

******************************
Intrusive thoughts: Impulse? Give it up. Don’t fight. Multifarious. Brutal.

Winds and flowers bloom;
The mind: ladybug or plain bug?
Skeleton rosebuds.

Old Dow Jones Haiku

**********************************
The Russian President, Medvedev, was making a speech.

A sidebar in the screen showed a clutch of Russian billionaires sitting glumly in a club in Stockholm.

A pale, bearded man was talking softly. “I hardly know who I am any more. I just don’t see myself in the same way.”

The television talkshow host spoke.

"These are the oligarchs, and the oligarchs took it on the chin. Margin calls. One guy had to liquidate all of his holdings in an auto parts distributor in Canada. He owned 20 percent. Imagine that. Overnight. Losing 20 percent of a company," the call-in television talkshow host had a reverent voice, tinged with awe.

"How can a margin call do that?" asked a caller.

"Naked shorts." Long pause.

"Naked what? What's that?"

"He sold shares he didn't have. He thought he could cover it by buying cheap. But, the price went up. Now he has to deliver. He has to buy the shares to deliver them. But, he has no money. So he has to sell every single stock he owns."

"Wow. Won't that flood the market? Drive the prices down?" asked the caller.

"Yes. But it won't do as much as naked swap-option derivatives," replied the host.

"What are those?"

"You don't want to know. You don't even want to know."

"Oh. Okay. By the way, doesn't Medved mean "bear" in Russian?" asked the caller.

"Hehe. Yes. Oh. That reminds me -- Ursula, the woman's name, must be derived from the Latin word for bear. Ursa."

"Hehe."

The Russian president finished his speech. Putin walked on stage. The people cheered.

****************************

Dreams changed. Not so clearly oracular.

Grass fires burned cars in the parking lot at Panera Bread while Tinguely was waiting for her sandwich order.

The barista offered her two free cappuccinos for her patience while waiting for coffee while the restaurant was evacuated.

She was watching old 16mm films of old war movie with WWII veterans. Tinguely was organizing papers in her backpack as the old tape rolled. The projector was noisy. Her paper shuffling was noiser.

She couldn’t find her car in the parking lot.

The more she was in a hurry, the more everything around her slowed: sandwich preparation, evacuating the restaurant, making her way through maze of fire trucks and hot, scorched vehicles to find hers, sorting a pile of papers that grew and grew and grew.

***************************
Dow Jones Haiku

(you have to imagine the words, the syllable count, the “pop” of insight and emptiness.)
***************************

Conversation with Dad.

FOX NEWS, FAIR AND BALANCED:
Albany, NY cityscape -- a gorgeous sci fi futurescape of equidistant gray block skyscrapers, illuminated at night (fitting, of course, for the brainchild of a member of the Illuminati). Rodan, the beloved pterodactyl from 50’s monster movies screeches and flaps his leathery wings. The “Egg” performing arts center starts to crack open, and a pterodactyl chick’s beak pokes through.

Tinguely’s “Notes to Self”

What looks like greed on the surface is motivated by sadness, loss, loneliness

What looks like harshness (reptilian alien) is often one’s projection of the self they wish they were… (hard, self-reliant, able to fly).

Risk takes you into the world of the unreal.

Omens and oracles – Are they projections? Are they not real? or…
Are the omens and oracles the real thing? And – we are simply the shadow of them? …

Foreclosure

2008-09-24T23:42:00.002-05:00

The three dozen or so abandoned, foreclosed houses had turned into moldering ghost-houses, their yards a fetid jungle. Swamp gas clung to storage sheds and half-drained swimming pools.

Tinguely Querer caught a glimpse of something much too shiny and smooth to be a dog, but too large to be a goat, cow, or pony. It slipped through the dark, waxy leaves of an unpruned magnolia tree, with what appeared to be a large, possibly prehensile tail, curling waggishly through the lower limbs.

Podcast: click here

The sound of raspy breathing and tree limbs cracking came from the magnolia. Although Tinguely was intensely curious, she decided not to pursue the animal. It did not seem to be a very good idea. The sounds continued and seemed to ascend the tree. Then, with a crash of branches and leaves, the sound stopped.

Dusk was falling, and the Pinella Pines Subdivision she had been hired to survey was full of abandoned homes, repossessed in the mortgage crisis. The homes were all less than ten years old, but the subdivision had a jungle-y, noir feeling. For every home with lights burning in the dining rooms, and citronella candles burning on the decks or around the pool, five or six had been either vandalized by owners angry over their suddenly unaffordable ballooning ARMS, and another half dozen were simply left behind.

****

Her cell phone startled her.

“Hey kitty-cat, how are you doing?” It was the voice of a guy Tinguely had met in the office of her latest client.

He had taken to calling Tinguely “Hello Kitty” or simply “Kitty” after he saw the Hello Kitty post-it notes she used to remind herself of dates to enter into her calendar. She had bought them because they were the only post-it notes she could find in the strip mall where she grabbed coffee one afternoon.

Tinguely thought of Hello Kitty backpacks, toasters, and pencil cases she saw in Hello Kitty stores in Osaka. She remembered a photo of a child soldier in Liberia who used a Hello Kitty backpack as a lucky charm. He also wore a cheap blonde chemotherapy wig. It was supposed to bring health.

“Hey, Kitty, Hello Kitty,” said the voice on the phone.

Tinguely smiled.

****

Then her dad called.

She listened for awhile, not responding. Then,her words came out, blurtedly.

“Dad. I think I had a vision last night. Sabotage. Key bridges and dams. I’ve started to wonder about the bridges and dams here. Commerce, security, fear, death,” Tinguely told her dad. “I don’t believe, but then I do care.”

The connection was bad. She could not hear his reply.

She glanced at the television. Then a USA Today headline caught her eye. A Senate subcommittee had just heard testimony on the impact of infrastructure sabotage across America.
Tinguely’s stomach clenched. Something scritch-scratched against the wall. It was a large gecko. Its tongue flickered, then it ran out the open doorway and into the hall.

****

After one week without air conditioning in the thick central Florida mangrove heat, a peculiar slimy mold started to coat the carpets, and mildew blackened the grout in the bathrooms. The 2800 block of Periwinkle Way, a cul-de-sac that bordered a small park and a "green belt" area, seemed to be the worst. The former owners had not vandalized their homes, or stripped them of anything they could pawn or install in a parent's home. Instead, they seemed to have left them in haste. In some cases, in mid-meal.

The large bank stuck with the properties was investigating reports of possible environmental damage around the repossessed homes.

The shadowy creature appeared again. Whatever it was definitely had four legs, a tail, and a head. But, what was it? It was much too low to the ground to be a dog. It was not shaped like an alligator. Just as Tinguely caught another glimpse, it dashed back into the shadows between two pale brick ranch-style homes. Something seemed to be scaling the wall, running up the kudzu that had started to overtake the south edge of the three-bedroom, two-bathroom mother-in-law plan ranch.

*****

Headline: Seven-foot Nile Monitor Lizard In Our Town?

Photo Caption: The Nile Monitor is a vicious predator that will eat anything that fits in its mouth.

Question: What were Nile Monitor Lizards doing in Florida? What started out as a cute birthday present, turned into large, smelly reptile that could escape virtually any cage, climb up walls, and scamper out open windows, doors, and cat doors.

The wildlife disappeared. The owners forgot about them. No one thought anything of it.

That is, until they started feeding on neighborhood livestock (dogs, cats, rabbits, songbirds, toddlers).

*****

Tinguely pulled up to the hotel in a rented Ford Mustang. The car was new, with only 8,000 miles on it but was already missing various knobs and part of the dash was brittle as though they had used the low-density polyethylene instead high-density – or, was it the other way around?

Toothless tiger.

Tinguely remembered when the Mustang was a hip, strong muscle car. You have to go back to 1966 for that, she thought. What happened in those 40-something years? That was two generations back.

Uncle Chunk used to brag that he had a Mustang. That was when Tinguely’s father was making his first millions in oil, gas, wheat, and gold. That was when a million dollars was a staggering amount. Now, one would have to earn ten times that, and she would still not be rewarded with the shock and awe that seemed fitting.

Uncle Chunk’s Mustang came from Tinguely’s dad’s largesse. He bought it for him as a graduation gift. It was a classic car, already more than 20 years old in 1987, when Uncle Chunk demonstrated that he, too, could somehow swim the weird and turbulent waters of male self-fashioning.

Nostalgia is cruel.

Tinguely’s graduation gift from dad was a copy of Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, and a collectible “rare book” rated copy of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Her mom gave her a check for $50. She used it to buy new windshield wiper blades for her rusty old Volkswagen Rabbit, and to go on a three-day carbohydrate binge, eating and drinking nothing but “postres mexicanos” and syrupy hazelnut frappucinos.

Struggling builds character, said Dad.

Tinguely balefully considered her Uncle Chunk.

Perhaps he could set up an offshore banking enterprise on Barbados. Tinguely noted with satisfaction that Chunk’s skin was already getting very leathery from too much subtropical sun. Chunk should avoid the sun. His ancestors (and Tinguely’s, for that matter), hailed from the Pyrenees between France and Spain. They came to trade in mink, beaver, and sometimes wolverine.

Sometimes Tinguely craved hot chocolate and goose liver pate. She assumed it was utterly atavistic. One of these days, her atavism could cause her think of impaling a captor’s head on a stake and anchoring it on an upended pike.

For now, the hide of the moose someone in her family had shot, skinned, and tanned would have to do.

You had to send a message, she said. Otherwise, you’re no longer the hunter. You’re the hunted.

****

Someone started shipping exotic animals to pet stores in America, even though, in theory, no one in their right mind would want a black mamba, king cobra, Nile Monitor lizard, Komodo dragon, Burmese python, or anaconda in their teen-age son’s bedroom.

Someone started shipping people to the Americas, even though, in theory, no current inhabitant in his or her right mind would want a fur trapper, clear cutter, distributer of smallpox-infected blankets, or wooden stockade builder to settle there, in the current inhabitants’ pristine and nicely-balanced ecosystem.

****

The Mustang hurrumphed to a stop. Injectors need cleaning? Too much ethanol in the gas blend?

Dusk had turned to night. Tinguely opened the car door and uncoiled her legs. They were tense and a little sore from too many squats at “Pump and Crunch” class.

The air was thick with humidity. For seemingly no reason at all, she felt a surge of aggression. Startled, she sat back in the car, closed the door and breathed deeply. When she felt aggression, it was usually a response to fear. What was out there? All she could hear were her own deliberate exhalations.

****

Seated in a corner of the outdoor café, Tinguely contemplated the wrought iron gates. The pillars were covered with coiled ivy and vines. It was dark. Tinguely was drinking coffee and slowly eating a cheese quesadilla when she heard the creep and crunch of something moving in the parking lot.

A thin man – a Praying Mantis in a limp t-shirt and gym shorts, spiky gray hair – appeared, then disappeared into the shadows.

Tinguely moved into the shadows so that she would not be detected. Her muscles flexed instinctually. He appeared thin, weak, alone. So alone and vulnerable, he would be an easy catch. For some reason, his presence made Tinguely think of death squads operating in Nicaragua during the 1980s. Appearance deceives. Thin, wiry creatures can be the most ruthless; they even attack when not provoked. Peligro. Danger. Not worth it.

Like the Burmese python she had seen in one abandoned neighborhood, she coiled herself around the chair, flexed herself. She felt the need to approach him. Saliva started to pool in her mouth, her quadriceps tightened with the need to spring and pounce.

She stopped herself just before leaping out the gate and pursuing him. Walking back to her chair, she sank down. In the distance, she saw live oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. Where were the alligators tonight? Were they in the mangrove swamps, or were they taking over the fountains and personal spas in abandoned neighborhoods? Cicadas buzzed.

She paid her bill and walked outside down a tropical rock garden. Something made her sniff the air, and what she sensed electrified her. Dial soap. Ben Gay.

The Praying Mantis man was nearby. Evidently he was injured. He would absolutely be easy prey.

******

The newspaper vending machine in the entryway of the hotel displayed the front page of the local newspaper. It featured a picture of a Nile Monitor lizard with a chunk of flesh and what appeared to be poodle fur hanging from its thin lips.

“Seven-Foot Lizard Preys Upon Pets”

With a mouth full of kill, eyes glittering with satisfaction, the lizard looked absolutely at home in Florida.

In the moonlight, Tinguely’s eyes shone.

If she had caught Praying Mantis man, what would she have done with him anyway?

Panhandle Coin and Gun

2008-07-27T23:12:00.006-05:00

Passersby walked down the sidewalk in front of the small shop. “Panhandle Coin and Gun” was a clean place, decorated with framed prints of famous gold coins, and taxidermied mule deer, pheasants, and two big jackrabbits.

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/panhandlecoin.mp3

“Where’s your jackalope?” Tinguely smiled. The coin dealer laughed.

“A coyote was the best I could do,” he said. An entire stuffed coyote was perched on a stand on the western wall. A rubber rattlesnake and a spray of creosote adorned the base of the stand. It should have been garish, but was not.

“Coyotes are good. Tricksters are always good. Jackalopes are better, though,” she said. Her hands felt a bit sticky from the SPF 45 skin protection cream she had applied a few moments before. She was trying to protect her skin the best she could.

“That would make quite a trophy,” he said. “Pure fantasy, you know.”

“Sure. Fantasy is what inspires the hunt in the first place,” said Tinguely.

“Let me go into the safe and get what you wanted to see,” said the coin dealer. Tinguely nodded. Her gaze shifted automatically to the television screen.

Two talking heads were utterly fascinated by each other’s insights into the economy.

“It was a classic boom-bust cycle. Most people get in at the tail-end of the boom. So, there are always a lot of late-comers. They were, of course, the major part of the body count. The late-comers lost big. Greed kills.”

“Yes. At that point, there’s nothing to do except to get out the pliers. Pull the gold fillings from the corpses.”

The program went to commercial break. Tinguely focused on the business at hand. She had been commanded by her father to buy gold. The stock market was firmly in bear territory. Bonds were weak. Banks were failing.

“Gold. It’s the only thing that holds up,” her dad said. “It’s the best protection.”

Tinguely did not agree. Gold was the one thing that pushed people over the edge. It was not liquid. You couldn’t eat it. People wanted to steal it. But, she had to do her dad’s bidding. She had agreed to it, after all.

The gold coin dealer was explaining the benefits of the new Canadian Maple Leaf .99999 fine gold coins. Tinguely was not paying attention. All she could think of was the image of a financial planner with pliers in his hand, pulling the fillings from his poor chump client who jumped and landed on the sidewalk several floors down from their posh offices.

The talking head on the left side of the screen smiled sweetly.

“Do you remember Drake Management? The San Francisco-based hedge fund? They lost millions of dollars in one week -- their hedge funds hurt them. They also had traditional fixed income funds.”

The talking head on the right side of the screen looked deeply into the eyes of the left-hand head.

“Oh yes, I do remember that.” Sigh. Inhale, exhale. “It was part of the sub-prime fueled mortgage debacle.”

The coin dealer glanced up at the screen and then looked at Tinguely.

“I don’t know why anyone listens to them. Their “objective” and “fair” recommendations are just on the things that they’ve been paid to promote. I call it an infomercial. It’s not fair and balanced news reporting. I don’t care what they say it is.”

“Investing is a science,” said one talking head.

“Oh yes,” breathed the other. Sigh. Inhale. Exhale.

That was too much for Tinguely. “Investing as a science? Hah! Well, whatever our society calls investing today is not much more than rite, ritual, and mutually gratifying self-delusion. Science seeks truth. Investing is -- well -- it's a kind of truth, but it's fuzzy. ”

“But aren’t you a scientist?” asked the coin dealer. “A geologist?”

“In a manner of speaking. But I wish I knew more about the fuzziness we need to build into our models. It's hard to see people suffer ,” said Tinguely. Her voice was sharp.

“You must have good insights into commodities, then,” said the coin dealer. His voice was smooth, bland.

“How much are the coins? My dad wants to buy a few,” she said. “He is like everyone else. He believes that truth is in the patterns. But where do the patterns come from? If you scratch the surface, they are from someone’s prejudices and beliefs.”

The coin dealer smiled. “Sounds like you had to read Georges Sorel, too.”

Tinguely pictured Sorel sitting on the front bench at a local high school pep rally, thumping and tapping his cane to the marching band and the cheerleaders shouting and jumping.

Strange bedfellows, indeed.

The coin dealer continued: “I remember Sorel – he said science was ‘too much of a conceptual, ideological construction,’ and that it crushes our perception of truth through the ‘stifling oppression of remorselessly tidy rational organization.’”

Sorel said systems always were simply skin stretched tight over belief, faith, and ideology.

Tinguely smiled politely.

“How much are they? My dad’s expecting me to haggle with you a bit. Do you mind?” she asked.

The talking heads were still talking, still reinforcing each other’s prejudices and each other’s rationalizations of the consequences of untrammeled greed.

The coins glittered in the morning light. The voices on the television droned on about predictive models and the science of supply and demand. The multiple working hypotheses were simply variants of dogma.

Frankly, she did not care. She was more interested in tales of the survivors of boom-bust cycles.

The dead coyote smiled. Its canine tooth glinted, the eyes shone dark and black as though to tell her not to bother, not to forget it had been felled by a brass-casinged hollow-point bullet that glittered like gold. Survivors? There weren’t any.

Ask any investor.

Posted by Susan.

Authority and the Essay

2008-07-24T23:59:00.001-05:00

Here is a video with revision strategies and ideas

And here is another --

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5146101322017919869&hl=en

Amy Winehouse: Tragic Camp of the Reinvented Bad Girl

2008-07-09T10:28:00.003-05:00

Amy Winehouse's exaggerated bouffant, Cleopatra eyes, and her own songs, "I'm No Good," and her remake of "He Hit Me and It Felt Like a Kiss," remind one of all echoes of earlier times. The perception is of women gutted by the male gaze, controlled by Svengali managers and boyfriends. Amy Winehouse's costuming and public persona evoke the tragedy of Anna Nicole Smith and even Dorothy Stratten, the Playboy centerfold murdered by her manager husband. However, the key difference is that instead of being physically dominated and controlled by an ever-present manager/boyfriend/husband, Amy's husband, Blake, languishes away in prison, where he is being held for obstruction of justice. While she claims he is always in her mind, he, by all accounts, is utterly powerless in his role. If he is in reality controlling her, it is only through the idea that she herself holds in her own mind about suffering and subjugation.

In the meantime, each mark on Amy's body offers the communicating public an opportunity to participate in an ongoing and ever-morphing story. The story is about love, about loss, and about heartache. It is also about the way a cut, bruise, needle mark, or blemish can symbolize the chthonic; a subterranean repository of meaning that is not ever quite visible, except in manifestations that bubble to the surface in the form of cuts, bruises, scratches, tracks, and more.

For more discussion, please read the full article here:
http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com/2008/07/amy-winehouses-cuts-tracks-bruises-and.html

Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5406910453985093449&hl=en

Virtual Worlds Are the New Poetry

2008-05-29T01:10:00.007-05:00

Podcast. Found Quote: Laura (Riding) Jackson renounced, on grounds of linguistic principle, the writing of poetry: she had come to hold that "poetry obstructs general attainment of something better in our linguistic way-of-life than we have."

So. What would that "something better" be?

Video games. Virtual worlds. Poetry gets in the way of video games.
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

*************

I do not know a single person who has spent time in virtual worlds who does not secretly wish for a "Through the Looking Glass" experience in which they enter the world, but can't quite figure out how to get back. And why not love it? It has everything you might want --

As for me, well, in the early and mid-1990s, I avoided those types of computer games. I preferred games like Sim City or "serious games" that blended education and training. I did not like the early experiences in virtual worlds. They reminded me of first-person shooter games, but with unfair advantages, since they involved charms and magical processes, and a one-on-one fight to the death with whomever you encountered along the way. No thanks.

My son, Marshall, and all his friends were a different story. In 1997, when he was 13, he started playing Ultima Online, a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORG). His persona in that the virtual world game was a skeleton wearing a long gray wig and wearing a wedding dress.

“You’re Miss Havisham?” I asked.

“Whatever,” he said. He was in eighth grade, but they had not yet had to read Dickens’ Great Expectations.

“Why are you a skeleton bride?” I asked him.

“That’s my avatar,” he said.

“What’s an avatar?” I really did not know.

“It is a divine being that has come to earth in physical form for a special purpose.” He clicked on an icon on his computer screen. “Look. Read.”

It was the definition of an avatar, which seemed borrowed directly from the Bhagavad-gita. No wonder this was such heady stuff. Turn yourself into a divine being. Make your being do what you want, until, of course, it is killed in combat with a wilier opponent, or one who has a better controller.

“Glad you like it,” I said, retreating to the kitchen where I poured myself another cup of hazelnut coffee. I then grabbed the book I had been reading, Norman Cohn’s, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, and settled in for a nice round of reading about true believers and flagellants who thought that they could ward off plague, pestilence and moral turpitude by whipping the first layer of skin from their backs.

Did it work? Ask the Shiite devotees on the festival of Ashoura. My personal feeling is that it does work, but who wants to go through the pain? Mortification of the flesh is so darn uncomfortable. Why break ourselves down when we can be gods and goddesses (at least on a screen)?

At first, I ignored virtual worlds, except for the occasional excursion into it when I couldn’t avoid it for professional purposes. Breakthroughs would occur. I’d go in, customize an avatar for myself, try out the activities available, and the leave feeling rather annoyed. I could not help but wonder if the person behind the avatar I had just spent time inanely chatting up --“Hi, cool boots, where did you find them?” and “Where did you get your skin? Love the tats on your neck” -- was a 13-year-old like my son was when he first started spending 6 hours at a stretch in Ultima Online. I found out later that he had even set up one of my computers as a server for the game.

He was hooked. I was worried. He was not getting enough fresh air and exercise.

When he took up skateboarding, I was thrilled, even though it meant road rash, broken fingers, and a circle of friends that included delinquents and guys who drank liquids from a bottle in a brown paper bag. Yeah. But at least he was getting fresh air and was interacting with real people. That was real life. It was where your heart actually beats, where real liquid actually pumps in your veins.

He had not really lost interest in virtual worlds, but I did not understand how it worked. This was 1997 and he was a part of a nascent trend that involved popularizing social networks via the web. It was far beyond forums, discussion boards, listserves, and the alt.net newsgroups I was still involved in. was setting up complex networks of acquaintances, and relating to them in a fluid, interest-based way. He was learning negotiating skills and leadership. I did not see it, though. I just saw a 13-year-old spending a lot of time eating Pringles and drinking Jones soda.

Strangely, Marshall's heightened interest in the Real World coincided with my own surge of interest -- not in the Real World (too scary) -- but in virtual worlds. I was starting to not just see, but live, the potential. I tried to tell Marshall about it, but he was not interested. Instead, he showed me how high he could "ollie" on his skateboard.

One afternoon, while I trying to decorate an office space in a virtual world, Marshall came into my office.

“Mom. I think I need to see a doctor. I think I cracked my wrist.” Marshall proffered up his swollen wrist. His face was flushed with pain.

“Why is your back bleeding?” I tried to keep the alarm out of my voice.

“Uh, yeah. Well, we were doing some stuff with some whips and chains, and I accidentally hit myself. Justin had a couple of nunchuks, too.”

“What was the purpose of that? What were you trying to accomplish?” I heard my voice rising in alarm.

“Mom. It was fun. Don’t you know anything? They were cool. Justin told me where he got his stuff. I think they sell them at the Medieval Fair,” he said.

Marshall’s wrist was merely sprained. The injuries on his back did not amount to anything more than deep scratches. His face glowed. The twin forces of the need for Mom, and the need to forge an independent identity made his eyes sparkle even as he winced as the nurse applied antibiotic ointment.

“Can we go by Braum’s and get a Butterfinger shake?” he asked.

“You think you should be rewarded for this?” I asked, incredulous. He laughed.

That night, I heard Marshall laughing as he managed his avatar in world. “Hey, Mom. Justin’s here. I recognize him. His avatar is stupid. I’m going to trick him. Watch….”

I watched Marshall maneuver his avatar, all the while avoiding leaning back in his chair, where he might scrape his fresh injuries.

For the first time, I connected to what he was doing.

Poetry is supposed to make you feel immortal, in touch with the gods, filled with “divine afflatus.”

Poetry consists of words that are supposed to function as avatars on the page.

Hah. Good luck.

Reading and thinking are hard work, and sometimes my mind wants to be led by my eyes in a glorious, glittery world of seductive encounters, magical capes and gowns, and enough fairy dust to sprinkle around so that people fall in love with whatever they behold.

The written word has just too many hard edges.

Interview with Veronica Inoue, Learning Review

2008-05-26T20:18:00.005-05:00

Welcome to an interview with Veronica Inoue, managing editor and director of Learning Review, the first publication in Spanish dedicated to elearning. The interview appears here in both Spanish and English.

1. What is your name and what is your connection to e-learning?
Soy Verónica Inoue y me desempeño como Directora Editorial de Learning Review, una publicación que aborda los temas de capacitación y desarrollo con nuevas tecnologías, donde se incluye el e-Learning. Learning Review comenzó como una revista latinoamericana y ahora ya tiene una edición completamente exclusiva para España. Además, soy alumna de una Maestría por e-learning y realizo otras actividades a veces como tutora y otras como participante.

I am Verónica Inoue and I’m the Editorial Director of Learning Review, a publication that presents themes of training and development with new technologies, which incluyes e-learning. Learning Review began as a Latin American magazine, and now it has an edition that is completely exclusive for Spain. In addition, I have a master’s degree in elearning, and I am often involved in other activities; sometimes as instructor, and sometimes as participant.

2. How did you first become involved in the topic of e-learning?
Estudié Recursos Humanos en la Universidad y vimos este tema en la cátedra de Capacitación. Dado el interés que me causó este tema (allá por el año 2001), realicé mi tesis en este tema; investigué sobre las implementaciones que se estaban haciendo en distintos ámbitos en Argentina en ese momento.

I studied Human Resources at the university and we say this theme in the department of Training and Development. Given the interest that this topic inspired in me (back in 2001), I decided to do my thesis in this area. I investigated the way that elearning was being implemented in several different areas in Argentina at that moment in time.

3. What is the Learning Review LatinoAmerica, and how did it come into existence?
Learning Review Latinoamérica es una publicación sobre capacitación y desarrollo mediado por tecnologías (e-learning, m-learning, blended learning, educación en mundos virtuales 3D), así como sobre mejora del desempeño humano, gestión del conocimiento y capital intelectual. Produce una revista trimestral en papel para toda Latinoamérica, un newsletter mensual con noticias, eventos y adelantos de la edición en papel, y un sitio web que se actualiza diariamente. (www.learningreview.com).

Learning Review Latin America is a publication that covers technology-mediated training and development (elearning, mobile learning, blended learning, and education in 3D virtual worlds), with the goal of improving human performance, the development of knowledge and intellectual capital.

Learning Review Latinoamérica nació para cubrir la necesidad de información y actualización que demandaban los profesionales de capacitación y desarrollo de las empresas de esta región. Es la primera revista sobre esta temática específicamente, en habla hispana.

4. What is the magazine's primary mission? Who is your target audience? Why?
Our primary mission is to be the partner enables training and development professionals to demonstrate the commercial value of their skills and specialties. We would like to establish a space where training and development professionals find, in a single place, all the information they need to keep current. We also aim to share experiences, trends, research, opinions and news in the training and development sector, that boost one’s knowledge in a continuous and accessible way.

Nuestra misión principal es ser el socio que permita a los profesionales de capacitación y desarrollo rentabilizar las prácticas de su área, así como generar impacto en el negocio.
Establecer un espacio donde los profesionales de capacitación y desarrollo encuentren, en un solo lugar, toda la información para mantenerse actualizados.
Difundir las experiencias, tendencias, investigaciones, opiniones y novedades del sector de capacitación y desarrollo de personas, que permitan crear conocimiento en forma continua y accesible.

Our target audience consists of the following:

Directors of human resources
Training and development managers
Directors of consulting groups that specialize in e-learning, corporate training, continuing education
Leaders of e-learning proejcts
Instructional designers and instructional technologists who work in e-learning projects
Chairs and others responsable for human resources careers and those affiliated with universities that offer e-learning

El target de nuestra audiencia conforma:
· Directores de recursos humanos.
· Gerentes de capacitación y desarrollo.
· Directores de consultoras de e-learning, capacitación corporativa, educación continua.
· Lideres de proyectos de e-learning.
· Diseñadores instruccionales y tecnólogos que trabajen en proyectos de e-learning.
· Responsables de carreras de RRHH y afines de universidades con oferta presencial y por e-learning.

5. What do you see as the most exciting new directions in elearning in Latin America today?
Creo que finalmente está insertándose en la mayoría de las empresas medianas y grandes. Latinoamérica siempre se encuentra uno o dos pasos atrás de las tendencias mundiales que suelen darse inicialmente, en Estados Unidos, Europa, Japón. Entonces, si bien en las grandes empresas el e-learning es un hecho y ya están yendo en busca de integrar el m-learning o los mundos virtuales, en las empresas medianas está iniciándose el proceso de incorporación y de integración a la modalidad presencial de capacitación. Desde muchos gobiernos de países latinoamericanos, se está comenzando a incentivar estas prácticas de e-learning, principalmente desde la incorporación de esta modalidad de aprendizaje a instituciones públicas. De hecho ya hay interesantes casos de e-learning gubernamental en Latinoamérica.

I believe that elearning is finally being incorporated in the majority of mid-sized and large companies. Latin America always seems to find itself a step or two behind global trends that tend to

6. What are some of the main barriers?
Lamentablemente, la conectividad sigue siendo una de las barreras más difíciles de quebrar en esta región. El problema nunca está en las capitales de los países o las grandes urbes, sino en las pequeñas poblaciones más alejadas de los centros urbanos.
También falta mucho más incentivo, capacitación, iniciativas por parte de los distintos ministerios o dependencias del gobierno (los ministerios de educación, de trabajo, deberían generar políticas y ponerlas en práctica para hacer de esto una cuestión de interés nacional).
Y por supuesto, no puedo dejar de mencionar la barrera cultural que en muchos países aún se torna como principal dificultad. En este sentido será fundamental el rol y la posición que tomen las universidades y los colegios; integrar el e-learning en la educación (en todas las etapas) es fundamental para ir rompiendo esta barrera cultural.

Sadly, connectivity continues to be one of the most difficult barriers to overcome in this region. The problem never occurs in the capitals of countries, or in the large cities, but in the small population centers more distant from the urban centers. Also lacking are incentives, training, and initiatives on the part of different ministries or branches of the government (ministries of education and of labor should generate policies and put them in practice in order to make this a question of national interest.)

Of course, I must not fail to mention a cultural barrier that in many countries still presents itself as the principle difficulty. In this sense, the role and the position that the universities and high schools take is absolutely fundamental. It is important to integrate elearning into education (at all stages) because it is vital in order to go forth breaking down cultural barriers.

7. How can more people have access to elearning?
Esta es una pregunta que es sencilla de responder; el problema es poder poner en práctica aquello que decimos (que es lo más difícil en Latinoamérica). El e-learning puede hacerse accesible a más gente si se pueden concretar iniciativas desde distintos frentes: gobierno, empresas privadas, instituciones académicas. Todos estos actores tienen una responsabilidad social; en este caso, hablando sobre e-learning, su responsabilidad es hacer del e-learning algo accesible. ¿Cómo? A través de capacitación online en cibercafés (que están muy difundidos en toda Latinoamérica); integrando esta modalidad en todas las cátedras de las universidades; promoviendo la capacitación online en centros comunitarios (ya sea tengan o no Internet); integrando el e-learning en la escuela (primaria y secundaria) y sobre todo capacitando a los maestros y profesores.

This is a question that's easy to answer, but the problem is having the power to put into practice what we're talking about (which is most difficult in Latin America). E-Learning can be made more accessible to more people if it's possible to firm up initiatives on different fronts: government, private industry, academic institutions. All the parties have a social responsibility; in this case, speaking of e-learning, the responsibility is to make elearning something that is accessible. How? Through online training in cybercafes (which are widely available throughout Latin America); integrating elearning in all university departments; promoting online training in community centers (whether or not they already have Internet); integrating elearning in primary and secondary schools, and above all, training teachers and professors.

8. What would you like to see happen in the future?
Me gustaría ver que en Latinoamérica se aprovechen todas las oportunidades y ventajas que tiene el e-learning y el blended learning, no solo en las grandes empresas sino en todos los sectores.

A Poll

2008-05-22T23:36:00.001-05:00

What is the best way to prepare myself to successfully navigate economic uncertainty? ( polls)

If You Are...

2008-05-06T01:36:00.003-05:00

IF YOU ARE....

You are.
and still if you are
You are.

millifleur serendipitous standard
significant and motley
such eradicated standards and times
we live in
when all is said and done
talk self surrender
tackle the plentiful calendar
columnar in spite of heart
stuck together with spit & kisses
x for luck
yes
i have a knack for that
such an illustrious nihilist
plundered penny-wise
fallen into that behooved something
brittle evasion & glassy

You are.
and still because you are
You are.

****************************************************************

Kithie ...
from Good Deeds Society (forthcoming)

orlando, florida
may 5, 2008

Flare: Unexpected Pressures in an Old Oklahoma Oil Field

2008-04-16T23:43:00.007-05:00

Podcast : Downloadable mp3 file...

Background: We drilled into an overpressured zone, totally unexpected in a mature oil and gas field. We were trying to recover the oil left behind, between the old wells. In order to avoid a blowout, we vented the gas through drilling pipe, ignited it to avoid an explosion. The resulting flare was visible miles across the Oklahoma prairie.

Ignited, I am burning;
the flow of gas from deep below is natural
but overpressured; my heart pounds,
a jet engine trapped 5,000 feet under the ground;

adrenaline has its own sweetness
on a crisp spring day like today

our new pickup truck, a collie named Zeus in the back;
crunch of gravel, rattle of cattle guards
the lease roads are as rutted as this old field
first drilled when they stored the oil in earthen lagoons

flared gas has its own freshness
in an old field everyone said was worn out, depleted, old

time loops back on itself; the roar of the past heating up the present
now, like then, investors came down from "back East"
drilled into the dark, red earth
archival photos: towns with board sidewalks
laws prohibiting dancing and spitting on those fresh boards;
a toolpusher smiling at a woman selling towels, sheets, and pliers

from boomtown to ghost town to boomtown
the story of you & me a lot like that
we thought our hearts were depleted
but then some wildcatting impulse told us to take the risk

we drilled, we hit, and it’s still such a surprise
encountering such fresh, recoverable reserves

*******

Reprise

I know we’ve met sometime and someplace before

sometimes memory needs the burn
sometimes my heart needs the heat

stave off the sadness:
an anonymous driller naming his first well the Ganymede #1;
an abandoned wife
watching oil rainbow her freshwater pond.

We can put the past behind us now;
Zeus is asleep in the bed of the truck.

The well is safely under control
hands calm with something to hold onto
now.

meditations on the bakken shale, lost loves, and cutting it close....

2008-04-12T23:07:00.004-05:00

podcast: click here

RISK
(responding to a phone conversation with an old geology lab partner, the purchase of a set of 4-blade razors at the United Supermarket in the High Plains town of Dumas, TX, and the U.S. Geological Survey’s announcement that the Williston Basin’s Bakken Shale may contain 3 billion barrels of oil)

The razor touches you, so you say –
infinite reversals & I’m in the play;
we’ve leased the trend and beyond
where I breathed the prairie, laid the sondes;
lips, nose, eyes scraping the infinite
laid bare, my dear, the anatomy of this planet.

Warm, pure, boom-time aura
to be not yet 21 yet in the laboratory of our futures:
future “lost love” concept spilled across the desk
plagioclase, orthoclase, staurolite twins
specimens of perfection
the heart throbbing in a wrist

the past pounding in my mind’s eye
your razor cutting close, me
you, talking into the deepest night
drilling into the deepest formations
of light, dark “I need you”
like Hamlet: a splintered objective correlative

razor the place I need to be
cut out what grows rough, shambling, ill-hued
& you, reduced to running with a blown-out knee
& me, chipping the samples, the outcrop
we’re still shaving reality like hope
so close it bleeds

On Hauntings

2008-04-06T20:09:00.004-05:00

Podcast. When I was five years old, we moved to an eerie, shadowy, haunted corner of a town located in the very sun-drenched and wind-whipped center of flat plains and short-grass prairie.

Our house was on the edge of Imhoff Creek, a snaky tributary of the South Canadian River, notable for its shifting sands which regularly swallowed Jeeps whole. The first summer in the house, I would see twinkling flashing lights and a thin, green glow hovering around the old farmhouse across the creek. Later that summer, the farmhouse burned to the ground.

Clowser, the original farmer, was said to have a son who disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle while flying a plane with weather instruments.

At night, our house was alive with the sound of light switches turning off and on, doorknobs turning, and curtains fluttering as though there were a strong wind, even though the windows were closed and there was no breeze. I started sleepwalking. I can't tell you how many times I awakened to find I was outside, standing in the dew-drenched grass of the front yard, or feeling my bare feet against the dark concrete of the driveway.

My mother had purchased the antique furniture that the previous owners had wanted to sell. One of the items was an amazing upright piano with ornately carved mahogany legs and lid. It was a magnet to a 5-year-old, which was not easy on my mother, whose nerves were already shattered with the noisy house, two small children, and a lingering case of postpartum depression. In desperation to put some semblance of order on the aleatory scatter of my own compositions, my mom signed me up for daily piano lessons.

It was a great idea. Learning to play the piano gave me something to focus on. Oddly, it even cured me of sleepwalking.

I started to forget we lived in a strange, little haunted corner of Norman, Oklahoma.

You'd think that as the neighborhood expanded, the farms were razed and additions with names like "Whispering Pines" and "College Park Estates" were erected, the ghostly sounds, lights, and cold breezes in the dead of summer would stop occurring. They seemed to for awhile, but it just was not meant to be. The creepy apparitions, lights, sounds, shadows reached fever pitch the summers I stayed at home and house-sat while my family traveled to Vermont to stay at "camp" -- a cabin my parents had built on 300 acres or so of land that once belonged to my ancestors who settled the land in the 1770s. As I listened to recordings by Julio Iglesias and Milton Nascimento in an attempt to drown out the creepy sounds, I wondered what had happened in that particular edge of central Oklahoma.

We were only 2 miles from the South Canadian, the site of the 1889 Land Rush. Perhaps this was a place of conflict. At the same time, it seemed quite likely that this was an ideal location for an odd little microclimate to emerge. We were, after all, between the prairie and the "crosstimbers", and the subdivision was built on a river terrace. Plains Indians lived here. I believe that perhaps they were Kiowas. They were subsequently displaced by the Shawnees and Potawatomis who were forced to live just 10 miles east of here.

A strange uneasiness grips me every time I return to my parents' house.

Neighbors' houses have come up for sale, and my parents look at me with hopeful eyes, thinking that perhaps I will purchase one and live next door. I never rule out the possibility until I go through the houses, and the creepiness hits me again. I look at my arms and see the hair stand up .... feel chills.

What do these things mean?

I realize, perhaps more than I should, that the notion of "hauntedness" is a construction, a linguistic as well as phenomenological condition. It is that state of extreme vulnerability that one should try, if possible to avoid, but of course, those who are so vulnerable are the least able to erect barriers against psychic and physical invasion. It starts when you wake up alone and you realize that there is nothing you can do. Eventually, as one grows up, one starts to learn to control the thoughts with other thoughts, and to substitute manufactured feelings for those horrifiying sensations that accompany the awareness that existence is a vast, gaping hole, with shining lights, whispers, and razor-sharp teeth at the edges of perception.

The hauntedness is something I take with me everywhere. I recognize now that everyone has his or her own measure of it. Thankfully, a frisky puppy, a brisk walk, a great round of one's favorite video game, surfing the web, or picking a fight with a relative will put some distance between one and that hauntedness.

Questions emerge. I can save them for later.

*****
http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com