I had forgotten writing this. I must have just finished something cyberpunk (likely the Mirrorshades anthology) and wanted to earnestly emulate it. This has some of the really satisfying momentum that good (post-)cyberpunk SF has. I had expected it to age poorly, to lose that energy that I was going after to begin with. Surprisingly, having reread it just now after a few glasses of wine and quieting the music (Silver Apples Radio on last.fm), it maintains itself very well. It has a few unintentional errors and gross confusions, but I can still pick out many of the references I had first aimed for. (Robes, for example, is named after Roberspierre.) This still has a surprising "fresh-ness" to it that I don't think my writing generally retains.
Why do I post this now? Well, I have all my past writing ready at hand on my current computer and it came to mind. Why did it come to mind? In Lorenzo Vincenzi's search for understanding his macabre case, he stumbles dreamily into a music shop. I needed some inspiration and "Dystopic Jam Session" came to mind almost immediately. I did not expect much from rereading it and was pleasantly surprised. Afterward, I felt that posting it might be satisfying for any fellow SF readers. If you are entirely unfamiliar with cyberpunk, then it may be a bizarre mixing of run-on sentences and onomatopoeia. If that is the case, then check out William Gibson's Neuromancer or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (which is technically post-cyberpunk) and everyone should watch Ridley Scott's Bladerunner, as long as its not the theatrical version.
If it happens to be your flavor, enjoy "Dystopic Jam Session."
~~~
Dystopic Jam Session
23 April 2007
Jakki started out on the drums, blasting away with her toothbrush in her left hand and the two sticks in her right. She’s a leftie so it made more sense that way. Intoxed on her retro-hardcore bands, she pounded and grilled and ran holes, or nearly did, thru those second time round thrifted drums. She scared the bejeezus out of me starting up out of nowhere like plastique under a desk. I thought I knew her as a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, and so we were like pseudo-fammed together. Her faded-jaded tie-dyed dreads flew in all spherical head-bobbing directions and damn if she didn’t know hot to play a toothbrush on a drum set.
Robes hopped up next, hitting strings on a half-stolen half-homemade bass hybrid, roughing up tables and breaking chairs on his way in, while he was in it, and out again one-oh-five mins later. Robes’ hair is the color of a lightning bolt, and I don’t mean white-yellow, but fucking luminous. He got some cosmo-headjob with fiberoptics that he programs with from an integrated wristpad and can set to moody-lights, fluxing up-down based on his neural activity, a basic straight-uplink. Robes beats shit up; people, cars, walls, screens, himself, but not animals. He played like an animal, like some fuckin’ lycanthrope jaguar beastie boy. He swears genies are bad shit and bat shit stupid and he ain’t one; he doesn’t fuck with building blocks, just rearranges them into things like electrical hair on which you could see a Bowl game.
Jakki spat at Robes when he began playing drums with elbows, ankles, toes, knees, and more spit. Robes kicked up tiles and jammed his metal shoe parts into the ground. People started watching, regulars and aimless amateurs, who wanted to condescend but were busy shitting with being-blown-away-ness. Some kid tore away from his handholding matron and began breakdancing in the midst of it. She screamed which led to four others screaming out majestic zealous notes like fundamentalist fools. The kid moved fast, encouraged by the screaming and the respectful space Robes gave him.
Inward I leapt, first getting kicked in the left cheek by Robes and then playing an amped trumpet into Jakki’s face so that I could see the color of her eyes in the off-chance I might want to screw her later. She whipped her long orange-red-green-blue-magenta-yellow-pink dreads at me. Yeah, she was a fox featuring tightstrapped goggles like wartime Brit comix, screaming and hitting me. Lips smiled around the mouthpiece and teeth clanked against the brass and silicon, fingers warping and winding the notes this and that-a way.
The kid had started trying to freestyle, using pop-lines and nostalgia rhymes from his ma’s tunes who had given up and was window-shopping for scandalous electro-items in alley-facing windows. Robes set down his bass atop the drums—Jakki didn’t miss a beat; that made me hard—before walloping me under my ribs to my right. I swung the trumpet at his nose, hitting him before he tore it from my hands and began playing like a pre-king jazz maestro. Jeeee-zus! I began swinging and shouting bullshit nonsense political manifesto gobbledygook before taking a retrofitted keytar when Lianna pushed in with her post-hippie double peaces and moons with Band-aid™ charms.
Lianna Mother Earth-hip checked me into the crowd and she rammed herself towards the pile of toys, from which she triumphantly pulled a kid-friendly electric harp she slammed against her body. Playing with mashed, clay-laden fingers that must not be feeling anything at all, and tore the shit out of it. The breakdancing-freestylin’ youngster ran off with her swinging round and round and round with that oversized-string-menace hanging onto her like a vicious unloved formula-fed alien baby. Jakki spat on the harp and Lianna began pounding out waves below hearing we felt in our ribs and marrows—one less not harming Robes or me any. Spinning got her post-revolution peasant skirt all fangled in necks of other instruments and they trailed around her thrashing. Robes skipped over the trailing electro-zither, not missing a chord in the discord of his mutualist solo. Something like bagpipes plomped exasperatedly against my back and I tried to get out of Lianna’s radius as best I could. Peddies ran back in waves like rad warnings came off the earth tone hued and patchouli—which mingled with her B.O.—smelling girl. Lianna played something fierce, though it lacked rhyme, beat, and harmony, and logic had fled at the sight of her tawny, flowered-over skin.
Something synced between Lianna and Robes like French Revolutionary groupthinking zeal in all the right places, not that a precedent comes to mind, and the sharp metallic squeals and clangs of the trumpet isolated and enriched the infrasound twanging of the electroharp. Lianna’s turn focused the sound on me and the grease in my hair jangled loose and my keytarring got out of hand in the alt-funkiest of ways, sneaking in and out and about their platonic-planetoid-Plutonian intermixed mastery. The motions of Charon entered my mind, the semi-orbital paths and the intermediary center of gravity, and my spinning and tap-tap-tapping like neighborhood machinegun warnings stealthily stole the show, but only for the fourteen or fifteen seconds before Jakki started pounding out again. She didn’t compete, didn’t jingle and jangle and dangle and dingle the drums and tophat and cymbals to overcome the racket of the three of us jamming. Out of the ash-gray clouds showing in via the skylight, her accents caught up like she was ahead of us the whole time and we were jamming no holds barred like real revolutionary underdogs, like forgotten zinester and locavore scenester beating proletarian elitists. We knew what was up and what was down and we were both.
The peddies and plasticized mothers with elastic cheeks and brows were mesmerized like dreamers unknowing, or the dreamers’ lucidities become overrated in the mystical visionary dreams brought on by damn good peyote. They hadn’t a clue. Robes was digging holes out of the ground with his feet, the clackity-clacking of the synthetic porcelain providing sharp, chaotic undertones. The breakdancing kid circled back and pounded his fist in the air threw his body into everyone else like a mosh pit-bound youngster asking for a fist or heel in the face. As Jakki doubled up on drums with toothbrush and sticks, the bristles flew into my eyes and I megalomaniac screamed, el presidente-style which spun tunes out of Lianna with long fingers tracing the strings up and down their lengths. Robes hair was crazy-on-fire, reds and yellows intermingling with his bleached blonde and the quasi-wrong of the image meant that I spat at him liberally and he screamed in my face and I spat in his face more and Lianna swung her fuckin’ harp and knocked the two of us over and tearing the strings out of the frame.
Robes and Jakki rebuilt the tunes, losing and regaining and pounding away at the mesmerized audience, sucking up the soundwaves like Vonnegutt’s harmonia, nearly glowing in powerful reproductive lights. They almost burst in succulent passion—the eyes a-glow and skin vibrating loosely, it was obvious—when Lianna shattered their inter-sensual minds with the zither that still hung loosely from her skirt. From the strewn out armaments of Lianna’s assault I hefted a heavily patched didgeridoo, making long low tribal sounds which were complemented immediately by high twin twittery sounds from Lianna who, all smiles and chasing laughter, sucked up my rooted tribal spirit, thinking me more of something I’m not that what I am. I blew and sucked and blew making the deepdown madnesses well up in the crowd, rumbling away at the windows in their frames and the old-style glasses of the crotchety vinegar-aged undermasculine protectorate in the kiddie playground. Robes didn’t laugh but picked up my long breaths and shifted, pulling out the high astral sounds from the electric machine at his lips. Jakki tapped away at quick insect monster sounds, making skin on my legs and back and neck wriggle feverishly, ensuring her bestial nature and vicious teeth.
York, all two-hundred-some kilos of him, pounded into the tile debris behind Robes and he whipped out his lengthy harmonica linked to ultrathin speakers in the sides of his head and sang thru notes unheard outside of York’s padded basement dwelling. I avoided York up to this point, buffed up on soups he liberally borrowed from the pharmaceutical companies until they paid him for weekly testing. At one point he had C-cup tits, but by the next week they were gone without any surgery scars. The pharms paid for the amp-implants and he used them whatever he played, which was next to everything, and the double-harmonica made a point of that. York had apparently crafted it himself based on old school possibilities. He played under and over us, as if bird-lungs breathed and rebreathed constantly. Layered and intermingled notes shattered like storm windows and car crashes.
Lianna was the first to duel him out from under her strings. She pulled a hairclip from her endless masses and twittered away at different strings in slippery-sliding ways, making noise to a rhythm, summoning infernal chords that soared like fiery wings and soured wild-grape-like with near immediacy. Trying to reach under their interplay, my long bellows poked out opposite, rancorous rich spring water while Robes space-danced mindlessly to Jakki’s tit-tit-tittering which had nothing going on with his timorous shatter-sounds clashing like lightning on my long waving outward gushing streaming.
Robes took it away from us, bellowing with extraterrestrial-quasi-binary musical measurements, alien and earthen and I couldn’t keep with it. My long rhythms fell into asymmetries and they stayed there, riveting and welding and razing it all to the ground like napalm blasters on grass hut villages. My breaths thundered throughout but unmet and uninitiated in the rites that Robes was dishing out. My head was out, displayed under the suspended guillotine blade just like his namesake would have wanted. So I brought it down, nearly breaking the damn thing, and started haphazardly shouting, playing with the meter he was playing, mixing and remixing my own voice back with internalized equipment, like pounding peddles built into your feet. It wove into his brassy-ballsy-mindboggling-madness and I loved it. Lianna and Jakki faltered at my playfulness, at the unforeseen and unlikely blasting of molecular mechanics.
York halved his timing, interweaving it more clearly into the back-and-forth rhapsodies Robes and I were managing like tech’d up-lard ass CEOs. York—that big limey bastard—managed to match my wavelengths and make words appear that were not words and sayings that were unsaid. I wanted to punch the fucker for messing with my specs from the outside. Then I heard it, the bridging between Robes and me with the harmonized harmonica hermeneutics: York was playing in between Robes and me, linking us like one voice or one instrument, like one entity, the three of us gathering up nonsense into pseudo-intellectual-down-to-earth-lunar-wheat-synth-synced melodies. York was with Robes and with me, synchronicity or synergy, and with just the gaps left open for Lianna and Jakki to freeplay into it, the holes waiting for wholeness. York had found some major ‘grades somewhere that could link us or our wavelengths or some shit like that.
Jakki held her sticks tightly, knowing the opening before it exploded in a whisper, and she filled it, bursting out boogeyman/closet monster-like. No more tapping or tittering or cajoling the sounds gently, she filled the hard vacancies with majestic magnitudes of lengthy, shimmering brass echoes and the ash-flow-stampede-tectonic-thunders from her linked and interlinked with York’s bio-psi-neuro upheavals. Lianna took her zither and the stringy tunes leapt egomaniacally out, crashing heinously into York’s attempted harmonifications—whatever the hell you might call his playing—just to challenge the Anglo-Russian bastard. He swept back mighty reverberations and she filled the space guided Jujitsu-majestic-like into where he made it go, sound-bending or mending or grinding. Lianna only laughed in crazed hippie-dazed ways with both sets of vocal chords, transforming her chortles into magnificent possession orchestrations.
So Robes was jamming away blues master style with wailing pale-skin banshee types laying ruin to his southern roots. Jakki was ferociously purring extinct wild cat like as her toothbrush shattered on the cymbals, before tossing her stick apart and playing all sharp tooth and claw vicious, zombie-fighting insanity chucking a piece of broken brass at Lianna, nearly hitting York instead, before it shattered a scent boîte in some no-name’s shopping bag. Lianna fluidly jammed, flipping her feet madstyle bewitchin’ and coaxin’ out the steps from York’s goliath heels. York, the pharm-mutie-Übermensch-fuck, harmonized and mixed anything with which I voice-blasted him while tapping his toes to Lianna’s asymmetric offbeats. His notes did more interweaving and mixing than self-expression; he synergized and awoke the intercontextualities of our disparations. My doubletiming voice and re-voiced mixing exhausted my lungs and blood spat out when the static started bursting from the subsampled phonemes. Words-to-noise, noise-to-words, words-with-noise-to-nonsense-lyricism. Somewhere in the game I felt the tickle in my head like the semi-conductor buzz of a new ‘grade as it nestled down my spine and into my throat. I coughed, hacked, overloaded and blacked out. I thought:
You fuckin’ newb.
York laid a solid kick against my diaphragm while I was out, forcing a cough in backhanded Heimlich maneuvers, and when I woke the rough point of a rib somewhere dislodged jabbed at my insides. After the cough, Lianna had kindly prodded me with her foot, still strumming away, to double check my breathing. How sweet. No one missed a beat since my pallor didn’t change at all. Who needs enemies, aye?
The four of them sat above me, laying fetal on the supersmoothed tiles, drinking madly from stickered-up boîtes, smelling of sweat and compost and homebrew, but mostly of sweat. York spat on me, Jakki grinned and splashed some of her drink on me. Robes and Lianna chattered furiously over guerrilla tactics and mastermind tacticians; I could catch only every third or fourth word. York and Jakki weren’t saying much, mostly watching each other and the crowds, flummoxed by the debris from the show and frightened by my ill-composed posture. If this is what friends looked like, what does an enemy come out with (or without)?
Sitting up, half-lotus and breathing shallowly, I noticed the freestylin’ kiddo was circling us.
“Hey, come,” I shouted, hiding the expected rasp behind a croaking voice. The kid wandered up playing certain and sharp and not-too-giddy. “Take t’is,” I handed him a small jumper, “check out when t’e folks are away. Nothing naughty, just some smarts. Hide’t.” And he slipped in a slim pocket by his collar; well-done boy. He laid down a simple pound and I laughed low before he dashed off.
“What was’t?” Robes.
“Tunes, lit, ideas in concentrate.”
“T’ink’t’ll g’in?” Jakki, wondering at my foolishness.
“He needs t’em. We’ll see nex’time.”
“Nex’?” Lianna. From off the table I filched a smokeless stick, lit it with York’s chained lighter, and dragged long and rough.
“If y’up t’it.”
They laughed at my hoarse lines. I smiled vaguely and coughed.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
A Place in Space
I have just begun reading Gary Snyder's "A Place in Space" and instantly love it. The edition is firm and vaguely sharp and sturdy in my hands, slightly smaller than expected but thick and substantial like a hunk of cheese. The prose is atypical, often broken but so simply rich. He relies on his own insight, experience, knowledge to encounter the world and share it with others. He is candid and warm and welcomig and I don't know what I expected but wonder why I had to order it after a year or two of looking for a copy in a bookstore. Immediately one identifies his beat (post-beat?) sensibilities and puts his Buddhist disposition out in front, like a sensing hand or sniffing nose.
I am working steadily through "Blessed Unrest" and James Tiptree, Jr.'s "The Starry Rift" besides, but with a few of Snyder's books laying around, I may get distracted.
I am working steadily through "Blessed Unrest" and James Tiptree, Jr.'s "The Starry Rift" besides, but with a few of Snyder's books laying around, I may get distracted.
More Views From My Bike
Summer in Lincoln is not altogether a pleasant affair. The other day it was in the upper nineties--where it stayed into the night--with simply awful humidity. Now, I don't tend to have much sympathy for the average exercise/sleeveless jersey shirt wearer. They simply aren't evening wear and if your body is such that it bursts out of its clothing, drop the car and get a bike, it'll help with the farmer's tan. So, it was with some dismay that I realized how tired I was with rolling up my shirt sleeves when I was biking, so I tore off the short sleeves of one and then two of my more threadbare undershirts. (One has a bunch of small paint stains, but they are of similar mint.) Not only that, but with oil spill picking up again today (turns out a robot ran into the "capped" well and broke the contraption) and its prevalence in the news overall, I thought it wise to put something on the back of my biking shirts.
More than once I have been accosted by passersby for biking and, more recently, for biking in the road. First of all, commuter bikes belong in the road. Walking is generally avoided in South Lincoln--everything is too sprawled out unless you're feeling ambitious--but there and just about everywhere else, roads are likely to be in better repair, not have debris, and provide more dexterity if an obstacle presents itself. As a fantastic little poster once posited, "We are traffic." So stop bitching and share the road. Second, at least once someone threw trash at me and at least once some school kids tried to tease me for biking. I don't get it, really. And given that these interactions occur at about 20 mph, I decided to put something on my shirt to speak up for me.
The latter is partially inspired (or at least cited as the appropriate figure) by B-Cycle's video announcement (PSA? Ad? Whatever.) and the former is a little double entendre that I made up--as far as I know--and has the approval of Miss Lacie Doughtery and Mr Ryan Hansen. It isn't a shirt I would, say, pay for, but something I guess I would wear if it were free. Besides, the typeface and picture turned out quite clear and concise, which inspires me. If you have any pro-bike jokes, statements, double entendres, or whatever, let me know, I would love to make more. Oddly, I noticed a shirt on a customer at Ivanna Cone with a similar image as the former, that is small figures stating that bikes have infinite city and highway mileage. The images were a little too small for much use, but I enjoyed it.
So, hopefully I can get retort to a few derisive comments, make someone laugh, and be a little fresher than I otherwise would be on my rides now. I am glad I got around to writing these shirts, which isn't something I usually do. Most of my friends may take note that I am not much of a tee-shirt guy to begin with. At work, biking, and doing chores I am pretty likely to be wearing one these days, but at school and around the house I tend toward the button up shirts. What can I say? I am classy like that.
In other news, I put up my hammock from Brazil. It has the Brazilian tri-color in a plaid pattern and is hitched around a tree and a deck post. It is absurdly widespread because it is way too difficult to find appropriately spaced columns around one's home. I plan on doing some quality reading with the help of sunscreen before heading off to work. It is strange to feel proud of such small endeavors--hanging a hammock, writing on a shirt--but they feel so earnestly appropriate right now, to summer and to sun and to biking. It is a strange, oppressive, and awfully weighty summer in Nebraska, but accented with deliciously cool, sunny days with their own sense of openness, of friendliness, and you are just there, enjoying it despite knowing that in twenty-four hours it will turn around and backhand you across the face.
Oh Nebraska, I have to love how sincere your seasons are.
More than once I have been accosted by passersby for biking and, more recently, for biking in the road. First of all, commuter bikes belong in the road. Walking is generally avoided in South Lincoln--everything is too sprawled out unless you're feeling ambitious--but there and just about everywhere else, roads are likely to be in better repair, not have debris, and provide more dexterity if an obstacle presents itself. As a fantastic little poster once posited, "We are traffic." So stop bitching and share the road. Second, at least once someone threw trash at me and at least once some school kids tried to tease me for biking. I don't get it, really. And given that these interactions occur at about 20 mph, I decided to put something on my shirt to speak up for me.
The latter is partially inspired (or at least cited as the appropriate figure) by B-Cycle's video announcement (PSA? Ad? Whatever.) and the former is a little double entendre that I made up--as far as I know--and has the approval of Miss Lacie Doughtery and Mr Ryan Hansen. It isn't a shirt I would, say, pay for, but something I guess I would wear if it were free. Besides, the typeface and picture turned out quite clear and concise, which inspires me. If you have any pro-bike jokes, statements, double entendres, or whatever, let me know, I would love to make more. Oddly, I noticed a shirt on a customer at Ivanna Cone with a similar image as the former, that is small figures stating that bikes have infinite city and highway mileage. The images were a little too small for much use, but I enjoyed it.
So, hopefully I can get retort to a few derisive comments, make someone laugh, and be a little fresher than I otherwise would be on my rides now. I am glad I got around to writing these shirts, which isn't something I usually do. Most of my friends may take note that I am not much of a tee-shirt guy to begin with. At work, biking, and doing chores I am pretty likely to be wearing one these days, but at school and around the house I tend toward the button up shirts. What can I say? I am classy like that.
In other news, I put up my hammock from Brazil. It has the Brazilian tri-color in a plaid pattern and is hitched around a tree and a deck post. It is absurdly widespread because it is way too difficult to find appropriately spaced columns around one's home. I plan on doing some quality reading with the help of sunscreen before heading off to work. It is strange to feel proud of such small endeavors--hanging a hammock, writing on a shirt--but they feel so earnestly appropriate right now, to summer and to sun and to biking. It is a strange, oppressive, and awfully weighty summer in Nebraska, but accented with deliciously cool, sunny days with their own sense of openness, of friendliness, and you are just there, enjoying it despite knowing that in twenty-four hours it will turn around and backhand you across the face.
Oh Nebraska, I have to love how sincere your seasons are.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Morning Writes & Focaccia
I have begun to listen to the "Writing Fiction" podcasts that are care of the iTunes U, whatever that is. It may be from the Open University, but I am not positive. Though I am familiar with a good deal of the material--I have spent some time in writing courses and involved in similar discussions--I find it comforting to hear it again. Many of the comments made by writers are candid and warm, self-effacing and earnest. I refer especially to comments on Morning Writes: Getting up early, or staying up late, to write without much getting in the way. Though my Lorenzo Vincenzi weird fiction detective story is going well--I was delighted to hear that Miss Lauren Fulner has read all that I have posted thus far--I thought it wise to take up the morning writes practice. I have difficulty maintaining such good habits, but it is a drive to get me up in the morning and a nice replacement for the recent forgetting of dreams. (I keep a dream journal, but it has been rather sparse lately.)
Anyway, here is what I managed to just finish. I started it upon waking, but the need for a shower and breakfast--not to mention my brother and his wife's noisemaking upstairs--drove to delay its conclusion. It started out somewhat journalistic--the feel of a still groggy mind--but developed into a sort of magical realism-gaslight romance feel. I make light suggestions of the larger world, but it evolves more and more into the anxiety of feeling divorced from that world. I hope you find it enjoyable.
Also, I am baking focaccia today for dinner with a family friend. I may have posted this before, but it changes a little each time. Here is a rough and tumble recipe for it:
Garlic Herb Focaccia
2 cups warm water
2 cups white flour
1-2 Tbsp honey
2+ Tbsp dry yeast
Blend in a large bowl and allow to rest about 30 minutes.
1 & 1/2 cups cornmeal
2 cups wheat flour (I'm using fresh hard red wheat)
1 cup white flour
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4-1/3 cup dried herbs (thyme, oregano, basil, parsley, black pepper)
four cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbsp salt
Add ingredients--begin with olive oil and garlic for ease, end with salt to preserve the yeast--and stir until slightly firm. Turn out on floured counter and knead together. The olive oil takes time to absorb, so it ought to remain sticky. Return to the bowl, cover, and allow to rest for at least one hour.
Flour for dusting
Olive oil for greasing
about 1 tsp course salt (optional)
Turn out on floured counter and knead, gradually adding just enough flour to prevent it from sticking. (You can use whichever flour you'd prefer; white for sweeter, wheat for heartier, cornmeal for sweet and slightly textured.) Divide into pieces (three or four loaves, probably), knead further and flatten into white circles or rectangles. Lightly grease baking sheets or pans (I've used round cake pans pretty successfully before), place loaves on sheets, then flip to grease both sides, and allow to rest. After thirty to forty-five minutes, indent the dough slightly and sprinkle in some salt. Let it rest about ten more minutes before baking at 400 F until golden brown, which is something like 30 minutes. Enjoy!
~~~
Now for a story...
First Mate,
23 June 2010
My mind is scattered, as if to the four winds. It is not that things are on it, but that it cannot support anything. I rest the simplest of figures, equations, notions on it and it just flattens and disperses like a cloud. The cloud mind. The cloud mind is a symptom of unpleasant things, a reality dealt with in the present that others have never detected, at least not to the prevalence of today.
I feel no duller than I did yesterday or the day before. In fact, friends and family can still remark on my wit and good humor, but it is all spoken ad hoc and when they remark on past conversations or jokes, it is all I can do to not burst out in tears. I cannot not summon it. The memories, the words, the depth, it escapes me altogether.
Only Jessica knows the truth and now I am frightened by her.
I have responsibilities. I am mate of a ship in the sky. We carry goods and people between the skyscraping cities. Many, many goods can be fired at lightning speed on electric currents over the land, they whiz and surge on their thin rails and make it where they need to go in a matter of minutes. Don't pack up the good china in them, it will probably only make it there in elegant little shards. Reception has contraptions for that to, if you let them use it, to mend the breaches in objects when you pick them up, leaving the faintest raised mark, like a forgotten scar over the porcelain or glass or what-have-you.
If you can afford it, you go for the dirigibles. The height, the view, the elegance, the excitement is unparalleled. We ascend higher and higher every year. In the thinness of the air, we go faster and faster, but without the bump and cajole of the trains. Here one can find a warm blossom of freedom, a flower that does not grow along tracks but where there are none and never will be.
It is in the sky that one must track a new course every time. Some routes are well-established, but with each new height and each returned season the currents change, the rivers in the sky transform. Early attempts were made to chart it, but the crew to do it was quick to discern its mercurial nature, its reinvention of itself over so short a period. Now, smaller craft dot the air and send out conditions, as fickle and unreliable as weather reports. Many have gardens on them—some with soil and others hydroponically in suspended marbles—to sustain the crews of one or two or three for their long expeditions to nowhere. I, on the other hand, need destinations.
To write, to dream, to recall; I cannot make sense of it. I am grasping at clouds, at straws, at the very sun and stars and moon in the sky. Something waits for us so high up, so far above the world. The more time I spend here the more I can feel it. The freedom of the winds is not the easiest of gifts to bear, and how I have borne it for so long.
This failure of mind, I suppose, is the result of some softness, some sensitivity to the world that the captain lacks. He is a hard man, determined to do his job and very little else. He has a locket with a print of his little wife back home. For a while she traveled with him, but it boggled her and she eventually confessed to hating it. She wondered where all the green had gone and asked everyone why they didn't miss it. She gardens, the captain would state, as I it were an explanation.
Those early flights when the captain was just starting and I still toddled after my mother and older siblings would go one for weeks, months. A global expedition was made by a crew from somewhere; they were short but fortified men, with the hard angles of mountains on their faces. They laughed easily, I heard. I met two working together on a flight when I was just a boy, eagerly throwing my weight into each tether, my fingers through each knot, my mind out in the rushing air. The men said the flight had made them all silent for months after their return, that it had gone just about as planned but no one has suspected the loneliness of such a sojourn. Even among friends, they said, it was all they could do to get out of bed. One man, with a week or so left in the expedition, flung himself overboard. He was a widower with a child, a daughter, who was cared for by his sister. The sister was distraught upon the telling of a story, an accident that had done it. They all knew otherwise.
We of the sky are far away from what makes us human on the Earth. I have read of evolution and out ancestors coming out of the trees and onto the plane, how our brains have developed to facilitate cohabitating in larger communities, about other mysteries of ourselves that I do not understand. Now, though, when I can muster the thought of it, I wonder what changes are afoot, what novel creatures we are making of ourselves in the sky.
I dread the silence of the long journeys of those early crews. We land frequently, sometimes multiple cities in a day. The captain is away from his little wife for such long stints, I wonder if she recognizes him anymore. I can think of her now, of her odd, almost child-like youthfulness; rosy cheeks, curly hair, fair complexion, short of stature, bouncing with energy—at least when she first boarded—and wonder why the captain does not return to her. Perhaps it was a marriage he did not desire, something hustled together in the wake of family tragedy or a surprise pregnancy—they have children, three I believe, of which the captain speaks little.
Our distance from the world at first bound us closer together. Richard, Germaine, Rose, Terrence, Keith, Julienne, Seville, Austin, Johann, Castor, Xin, and of course Jessica; these men and women have flown with my for years, my gales are theirs and my clear skies are theirs. We have adopted a silent language, one that includes the captain and one that does not. We accomplish our tasks, share meals in the galley, stroll about on deck, and appear in the infirmary when one of us is taken ill. Words, though, they continue to evaporate out of our hands, our mouths, our minds.
Jessica painted a mural in the galley on her off hours. It is a long cord, its individual threads coarse and defined and reminiscent of bulging muscle. It is set against a blue sky, light clouds to the left and malign thunderheads to the right. Where there are damages in the rope, Jessica painted complex knots to secure it. The mural is wide, filling the galley with a faintly blue light with its reflectivity. We applauded here and she smiled and nodded and said very little.
Afterward, she and I drank together. I have known her for many years and in fact recruited her for the Aspire when she first began to fly. I was not first mate then, but I had promise and the captain listened to me. That was still when the Aspire was a MkII; now it has become a MkXI, with very little of it remaining from those more rustic days. The new ship rises up around the old one, like a vine snaking all over, even inside where walls or frames or bars of metal are replaced with lighter material or sturdier girders. The captain aims to keep the mural in good repair throughout, which does cause some slight delay in the renovations.
After a few drinks, I confessed to her things that one addresses after drinks. My admiration, my satisfaction with her joining us on the Aspire, and then my anxiety about fading concentration. She smiled all the time, laughing a little at my earnestness. I thought of pushing her with affection, but her firm body language and slightly condescending grin deterred me. She spoke to, but mostly in the silent language of the crew that she had learned with indomitable speed.
That was months, maybe years ago. Time functions differently at these altitudes. It does not speak clearly anymore, but echoes and reverberates; dealing unforeseeable repercussions to the mind. Sometimes, between the clouds or in the stars, we fancy we can see the future or the past. These episodes give us chills and shivers and shudders. They are not alarming in their content, but by their reality. These images come with an unwholesome clarity, a dream-like certainty. We only acknowledge them with our silent language, movements of hand and suggestions of the eye; perhaps it is superstition, but to do anymore carries its own anxiety.
Jessica began to paint them. She keeps the canvases—made from spare wood, a sheet of steel, large shards of glass, a tightened length of sail—in her room, tucked into a wide, flat locker in the back of her cabin. She has less and less time to paint between the frequent landings and disembarkations, for which I am thankful. They are infused with that same certainty, that same unsettling reality. I wonder if she sees them more clearly. I attempted to speak with Germaine, Rose, and eventually Xin about them, each of whom I assumed had at least seen the image above her bed of a starflung walled city, but could identify in them a firmness of purposeful disinterest, took their cues, and avoided the subject.
I have spent eighteen months aerial. Eighteen months without more than an hour set foot on solid ground. I ignore the banister of the ship, what lies beyond; I make a point to not look upward, to see the invisible nations there. Jessica has taken up silence against me; not just the silence of words, which is nearly ubiquitous, but true silence. She speaks only sparingly to others, but makes eye contact and gestures to acknowledge others in passing. I fear her and, sometimes I fancy, she fears me.
We are skybound, always reaching greater heights and always becoming forgetful of the world beneath us. That world, after all, is so often displaced by its sisters seen like dreams through mist or between clouds or from impossible distances. The longer we are away the closer we approach them, the larger their renderings, the more fearful their actuality. My whispering mind, the flitting distraction of my every ghost of a thought, I wonder where it goes. I think that it is steps ahead of me, guiding me ever upward. Guiding me to places I refuse to see.
Anyway, here is what I managed to just finish. I started it upon waking, but the need for a shower and breakfast--not to mention my brother and his wife's noisemaking upstairs--drove to delay its conclusion. It started out somewhat journalistic--the feel of a still groggy mind--but developed into a sort of magical realism-gaslight romance feel. I make light suggestions of the larger world, but it evolves more and more into the anxiety of feeling divorced from that world. I hope you find it enjoyable.
Also, I am baking focaccia today for dinner with a family friend. I may have posted this before, but it changes a little each time. Here is a rough and tumble recipe for it:
Garlic Herb Focaccia
2 cups warm water
2 cups white flour
1-2 Tbsp honey
2+ Tbsp dry yeast
Blend in a large bowl and allow to rest about 30 minutes.
1 & 1/2 cups cornmeal
2 cups wheat flour (I'm using fresh hard red wheat)
1 cup white flour
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4-1/3 cup dried herbs (thyme, oregano, basil, parsley, black pepper)
four cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbsp salt
Add ingredients--begin with olive oil and garlic for ease, end with salt to preserve the yeast--and stir until slightly firm. Turn out on floured counter and knead together. The olive oil takes time to absorb, so it ought to remain sticky. Return to the bowl, cover, and allow to rest for at least one hour.
Flour for dusting
Olive oil for greasing
about 1 tsp course salt (optional)
Turn out on floured counter and knead, gradually adding just enough flour to prevent it from sticking. (You can use whichever flour you'd prefer; white for sweeter, wheat for heartier, cornmeal for sweet and slightly textured.) Divide into pieces (three or four loaves, probably), knead further and flatten into white circles or rectangles. Lightly grease baking sheets or pans (I've used round cake pans pretty successfully before), place loaves on sheets, then flip to grease both sides, and allow to rest. After thirty to forty-five minutes, indent the dough slightly and sprinkle in some salt. Let it rest about ten more minutes before baking at 400 F until golden brown, which is something like 30 minutes. Enjoy!
~~~
Now for a story...
First Mate,
23 June 2010
My mind is scattered, as if to the four winds. It is not that things are on it, but that it cannot support anything. I rest the simplest of figures, equations, notions on it and it just flattens and disperses like a cloud. The cloud mind. The cloud mind is a symptom of unpleasant things, a reality dealt with in the present that others have never detected, at least not to the prevalence of today.
I feel no duller than I did yesterday or the day before. In fact, friends and family can still remark on my wit and good humor, but it is all spoken ad hoc and when they remark on past conversations or jokes, it is all I can do to not burst out in tears. I cannot not summon it. The memories, the words, the depth, it escapes me altogether.
Only Jessica knows the truth and now I am frightened by her.
I have responsibilities. I am mate of a ship in the sky. We carry goods and people between the skyscraping cities. Many, many goods can be fired at lightning speed on electric currents over the land, they whiz and surge on their thin rails and make it where they need to go in a matter of minutes. Don't pack up the good china in them, it will probably only make it there in elegant little shards. Reception has contraptions for that to, if you let them use it, to mend the breaches in objects when you pick them up, leaving the faintest raised mark, like a forgotten scar over the porcelain or glass or what-have-you.
If you can afford it, you go for the dirigibles. The height, the view, the elegance, the excitement is unparalleled. We ascend higher and higher every year. In the thinness of the air, we go faster and faster, but without the bump and cajole of the trains. Here one can find a warm blossom of freedom, a flower that does not grow along tracks but where there are none and never will be.
It is in the sky that one must track a new course every time. Some routes are well-established, but with each new height and each returned season the currents change, the rivers in the sky transform. Early attempts were made to chart it, but the crew to do it was quick to discern its mercurial nature, its reinvention of itself over so short a period. Now, smaller craft dot the air and send out conditions, as fickle and unreliable as weather reports. Many have gardens on them—some with soil and others hydroponically in suspended marbles—to sustain the crews of one or two or three for their long expeditions to nowhere. I, on the other hand, need destinations.
To write, to dream, to recall; I cannot make sense of it. I am grasping at clouds, at straws, at the very sun and stars and moon in the sky. Something waits for us so high up, so far above the world. The more time I spend here the more I can feel it. The freedom of the winds is not the easiest of gifts to bear, and how I have borne it for so long.
This failure of mind, I suppose, is the result of some softness, some sensitivity to the world that the captain lacks. He is a hard man, determined to do his job and very little else. He has a locket with a print of his little wife back home. For a while she traveled with him, but it boggled her and she eventually confessed to hating it. She wondered where all the green had gone and asked everyone why they didn't miss it. She gardens, the captain would state, as I it were an explanation.
Those early flights when the captain was just starting and I still toddled after my mother and older siblings would go one for weeks, months. A global expedition was made by a crew from somewhere; they were short but fortified men, with the hard angles of mountains on their faces. They laughed easily, I heard. I met two working together on a flight when I was just a boy, eagerly throwing my weight into each tether, my fingers through each knot, my mind out in the rushing air. The men said the flight had made them all silent for months after their return, that it had gone just about as planned but no one has suspected the loneliness of such a sojourn. Even among friends, they said, it was all they could do to get out of bed. One man, with a week or so left in the expedition, flung himself overboard. He was a widower with a child, a daughter, who was cared for by his sister. The sister was distraught upon the telling of a story, an accident that had done it. They all knew otherwise.
We of the sky are far away from what makes us human on the Earth. I have read of evolution and out ancestors coming out of the trees and onto the plane, how our brains have developed to facilitate cohabitating in larger communities, about other mysteries of ourselves that I do not understand. Now, though, when I can muster the thought of it, I wonder what changes are afoot, what novel creatures we are making of ourselves in the sky.
I dread the silence of the long journeys of those early crews. We land frequently, sometimes multiple cities in a day. The captain is away from his little wife for such long stints, I wonder if she recognizes him anymore. I can think of her now, of her odd, almost child-like youthfulness; rosy cheeks, curly hair, fair complexion, short of stature, bouncing with energy—at least when she first boarded—and wonder why the captain does not return to her. Perhaps it was a marriage he did not desire, something hustled together in the wake of family tragedy or a surprise pregnancy—they have children, three I believe, of which the captain speaks little.
Our distance from the world at first bound us closer together. Richard, Germaine, Rose, Terrence, Keith, Julienne, Seville, Austin, Johann, Castor, Xin, and of course Jessica; these men and women have flown with my for years, my gales are theirs and my clear skies are theirs. We have adopted a silent language, one that includes the captain and one that does not. We accomplish our tasks, share meals in the galley, stroll about on deck, and appear in the infirmary when one of us is taken ill. Words, though, they continue to evaporate out of our hands, our mouths, our minds.
Jessica painted a mural in the galley on her off hours. It is a long cord, its individual threads coarse and defined and reminiscent of bulging muscle. It is set against a blue sky, light clouds to the left and malign thunderheads to the right. Where there are damages in the rope, Jessica painted complex knots to secure it. The mural is wide, filling the galley with a faintly blue light with its reflectivity. We applauded here and she smiled and nodded and said very little.
Afterward, she and I drank together. I have known her for many years and in fact recruited her for the Aspire when she first began to fly. I was not first mate then, but I had promise and the captain listened to me. That was still when the Aspire was a MkII; now it has become a MkXI, with very little of it remaining from those more rustic days. The new ship rises up around the old one, like a vine snaking all over, even inside where walls or frames or bars of metal are replaced with lighter material or sturdier girders. The captain aims to keep the mural in good repair throughout, which does cause some slight delay in the renovations.
After a few drinks, I confessed to her things that one addresses after drinks. My admiration, my satisfaction with her joining us on the Aspire, and then my anxiety about fading concentration. She smiled all the time, laughing a little at my earnestness. I thought of pushing her with affection, but her firm body language and slightly condescending grin deterred me. She spoke to, but mostly in the silent language of the crew that she had learned with indomitable speed.
That was months, maybe years ago. Time functions differently at these altitudes. It does not speak clearly anymore, but echoes and reverberates; dealing unforeseeable repercussions to the mind. Sometimes, between the clouds or in the stars, we fancy we can see the future or the past. These episodes give us chills and shivers and shudders. They are not alarming in their content, but by their reality. These images come with an unwholesome clarity, a dream-like certainty. We only acknowledge them with our silent language, movements of hand and suggestions of the eye; perhaps it is superstition, but to do anymore carries its own anxiety.
Jessica began to paint them. She keeps the canvases—made from spare wood, a sheet of steel, large shards of glass, a tightened length of sail—in her room, tucked into a wide, flat locker in the back of her cabin. She has less and less time to paint between the frequent landings and disembarkations, for which I am thankful. They are infused with that same certainty, that same unsettling reality. I wonder if she sees them more clearly. I attempted to speak with Germaine, Rose, and eventually Xin about them, each of whom I assumed had at least seen the image above her bed of a starflung walled city, but could identify in them a firmness of purposeful disinterest, took their cues, and avoided the subject.
I have spent eighteen months aerial. Eighteen months without more than an hour set foot on solid ground. I ignore the banister of the ship, what lies beyond; I make a point to not look upward, to see the invisible nations there. Jessica has taken up silence against me; not just the silence of words, which is nearly ubiquitous, but true silence. She speaks only sparingly to others, but makes eye contact and gestures to acknowledge others in passing. I fear her and, sometimes I fancy, she fears me.
We are skybound, always reaching greater heights and always becoming forgetful of the world beneath us. That world, after all, is so often displaced by its sisters seen like dreams through mist or between clouds or from impossible distances. The longer we are away the closer we approach them, the larger their renderings, the more fearful their actuality. My whispering mind, the flitting distraction of my every ghost of a thought, I wonder where it goes. I think that it is steps ahead of me, guiding me ever upward. Guiding me to places I refuse to see.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
"Grappling with a strange world"
Update (18 June): In this and the subsequent comment(s) I make statements that I cannot easily support with research or outside material. I welcome criticism, even strong critique, as long as it is done in a collegial manner. Most of this was written as a loose, intellectual synthesis of ideas I have been encountering of late. Especially claims concerning historically powerful entities--industrialists, corporate entities, political powerhouses--are made loosely; I can point out a few outstanding individuals, but do not have the academic background to make a thorough enumeration or accounting thereof. Again, any comments are greatly appreciated.
Reading through the wintertime musings of Miss Ellie Rogers, paging through the much delayed Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken, watching the film The New World, listening to Michio Kaku's book Physics of the Impossible, and reading BPRD comics (see image below, click for a larger image), I have come to wonder about "grappling." Grappling, not in the sense of wrestling, but in the way the character of Dr. Kate Corrigan uses it, and in a way Ellie and Hawken I think would agree. This is an odd motif I have found in a number of my current, shall we say, exploration: That we are in the process of handling--understanding, defining, articulating, interacting with, cohabitating with, etc.--this remarkably peculiar and conceptually complex object/idea/reality that is the world.
When confronted with some novel aspect of reality, I cannot help but appreciate the grand mystery that has been suddenly thrust upon us. When Colin Farrell's Captain John Smith is freed of his chains to explore the otherworldly greenness of pre-colonial Virginia, he neither speaks nor writes nor laughs; he is simply taken by this new reality. Hawken points out that through the 19th Century, most Westerners viewed forests as the realms of darkness, wild animals, and dangerous natives; regions that couched the unwholesome, furtive realities of untamed wildness. Thoreau and Emerson among other Transcendentalists, as well as Romaticists in their own manner, took Nature and Wildness as an entirely different notion, one in which humanity is inevitably interwoven. The incorporation of humanity into notions of Nature expanded into ecological study and environmentalism; a field and sister social movement that realized the togetherness of soil, water, sky, and flesh, both in a poetic spiritual manner and a empirical scientific way.
Ellie posted this quote from Russel Banks:
I want to build on this. Banks emphasizes our psycho-social need for storytelling to frame ourselves within our shared reality. In his comments on the danger of forgetting, he does not recognize our previous exercise in forgetting previous ecological-economic-social order. Ellie puts it:
What I mean to connect here is that what Banks wants our storytellers to frame, what Ellie recognizes, and what our cultural has frustratingly forgotten, is our connection to a real, substantial, and spiritual place.
I don't want to state this in a trite way, nor do I want to overemphasize natural landscapes. Presently, the resurgence of urban environmentalism, urban gardens, and favela/slum ecopragmatism makes it clear that an "natural" landscape isn't the necessary starting point for a social narrative of earthbound connectedness. If anything, these movements invigorate a variety of the social narrative in which earth, soil, life, biology, ecology, rootedness, and liveliness intertwine with pragmatism, problem-solving, population density/cities, cooperation, industry (in the broad, personal sense), and development (in a loose connotation). Notice that these are both concrete realities (soil and cities, for example) and intellectual objects (biology, ecology, pragmatism) and social-spiritual characteristics (life, rootedness, cooperation). It isn't a prescription for development, but a cord woven tightly from many, many threads composed of different materials; a cord that grows and strengthens in order to hold people, place, and spirit together.
Perhaps I speak more plainly of spirit than I am wont to do. But, ultimately, I think that the "object" of the world cannot be defined and obviously not articulated without the incorporation of spirit in some manner. Some friends and colleagues of mine, I doubt, would have much if any problem with incorporating spirit into this conversation. But it is less of a foundation for me and more of a girder, used again and again to refit, strengthen, and support the overall structure. That is in part why I began with the image from the BPRD comic (a spinoff of the Hellboy series). The conversation involves folklorist and historian Dr. Kate Corrigan and a mysterious rare books dealer in France, with whom they are exploring various artifacts of Medieval France. For the characters of BPRD--Hellboy, a demon do-gooder (inactive); Liz Sherman, a pyrokinetic; Abe Sapien, an extraordinarily long-lived aquatic humanoid; Johann Kraus, a disembodied median in a specialized containment suit; Roger, a Medieval humunculous; Benjamin Daimio, a mysteriously resurrected special ops soldier; and Dr Kate Corrigan--spirit is just part of the necessary means for explaining the world they experience, the world they have lived. Grappling, in their cases, involves a bit more than a hard materialist could muster for empirical explanation.
The conversation, you see, is not especially limited to the pages of the comic. What Ellie describes--and here I am synthesizing our conversations and her above comment--is not simply the physical reality of place, which would be something like making long houses in the Northwest because of trees and pueblos in the Southwest because of clay and stone. Rather, it has to do with the spiritual existence of a place and the things living therein. A personal spirituality and social mythology or soulfulness arises from the coexistence of place and people. Coexistence isn't exactly the word I mean; what I intend is more accurately a symbiosis or hybridization of psycho-physiological entities into one persona or community of personae.
What has often been missing in dominant Western cultures, which was been increasingly enforced since the Industrial Revolution, was a strong separation between person/personal identity and the location of that person in space and time. Of course, that space and time is relative to the individual's surroundings, which includes history, other people, animals, ecology, agriculture, and ultimately its future. Hawken tells the story of the Luddites and General Ned Ludd--a story with which I was previously familiar--in which a nascent social cognizance of a right to full employment is directly exercised. In addition, the mythical Ned Ludd manages to embody the role of land, employment, and labor that is manifested in the identities of displaced artisanal workers. The enforcement of such division would be easy in the face of truly atrocious child labor, unsafe working conditions, and short-lived employees. Suddenly, the symbiosis of person with land because person to work; not only is the partner distinct, but the preposition denotes a much more one-sided attachment. The work pulls from the person, takes the labor often at a horrible cost.
In addition, this new synthesis of person and other (land, work, etc.) is conceptualized as material interconnections. Bruno Latour has pointed out social and philosophical impacts of material-material dichotomies, but here I only want to emphasize the importance of material spiritual mutualism. I want to say more than I very well ought to. What I have in mind is a balance or imbalance between individual--described as having both material and ethereal properties, as well as internal and social, and so on--and some correspondent "mate." In one case, that mate is the land, rich with physical richness and diversity and a potent spiritual reality; the other case is work--distinguishable from labor by being an institution rather than an activity--with its extractive, capital-based notional infrastructure. By alloying ourselves with work, we even have the potential to redefine land in a work-based mental picture: Land is a place of resources for use, similar to a pool of potential employees.
The present predicament is more and more about severing the mental construction of capitalism--a set of resources that require extraction for capital meaning--and understanding alternatives. Indigenous rights groups around the globe are shouting for support and attention, suggesting an articulation of "The Rights of Mother Earth" so that social and environmental incongruities can be dismissed. I understand these endeavors as a hope to bridge a gap between a generally land-based philosophical picture and a generally capital-based philosophical picture. Unfortunately, the notion of rights is strongly built on a capital-based social reality--one of the first articulated rights was the right to property, i.e. the capitalization of land. The aspiration one can hold out is that this bridge ultimately segues the capital-philosophy to a land-philosophy or some manageable hybrid of the two.
These two psycho-social philosophies are means by which we can grapple with the world. They explicate the world as having certain characteristics, specific attributes that make it understandable. I cannot escape the notion that these mindsets are only tools for handling the world around us, with its rich and delightful and awful confusion. Again and again I am confronted by this strange and enriching and terrifying bewilderment. Whether it is through land or spirit or a breath of fresh air, I personally aspire to make better sense of it, to feel it more precisely than I am currently able.
Reading through the wintertime musings of Miss Ellie Rogers, paging through the much delayed Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken, watching the film The New World, listening to Michio Kaku's book Physics of the Impossible, and reading BPRD comics (see image below, click for a larger image), I have come to wonder about "grappling." Grappling, not in the sense of wrestling, but in the way the character of Dr. Kate Corrigan uses it, and in a way Ellie and Hawken I think would agree. This is an odd motif I have found in a number of my current, shall we say, exploration: That we are in the process of handling--understanding, defining, articulating, interacting with, cohabitating with, etc.--this remarkably peculiar and conceptually complex object/idea/reality that is the world.
When confronted with some novel aspect of reality, I cannot help but appreciate the grand mystery that has been suddenly thrust upon us. When Colin Farrell's Captain John Smith is freed of his chains to explore the otherworldly greenness of pre-colonial Virginia, he neither speaks nor writes nor laughs; he is simply taken by this new reality. Hawken points out that through the 19th Century, most Westerners viewed forests as the realms of darkness, wild animals, and dangerous natives; regions that couched the unwholesome, furtive realities of untamed wildness. Thoreau and Emerson among other Transcendentalists, as well as Romaticists in their own manner, took Nature and Wildness as an entirely different notion, one in which humanity is inevitably interwoven. The incorporation of humanity into notions of Nature expanded into ecological study and environmentalism; a field and sister social movement that realized the togetherness of soil, water, sky, and flesh, both in a poetic spiritual manner and a empirical scientific way.
Ellie posted this quote from Russel Banks:
"No other species needs to be constantly reminded and taught what it is to be itself. And it is our story-tellers, our poets, our novelists and dramatists, who have always performed this task. And surely, in this moment in the history of our species, when there is such a danger of forgetting and so much inducement to forget, we must not waste our limited time here doing anything else."
I want to build on this. Banks emphasizes our psycho-social need for storytelling to frame ourselves within our shared reality. In his comments on the danger of forgetting, he does not recognize our previous exercise in forgetting previous ecological-economic-social order. Ellie puts it:
Tom and I talked once about the way a place can change you. I am starting to believe a little more in things unseen. Tom says he's read about this phenomenon in anthropology, this maybe unknowable thing, and someone called it the Invisible Constant of Place. Anthropologists know it's there: place will dictate what you eat, how you build shelters, all those practical things. But of course it must affect our spirits a little too, the shapes we know in the world. It reminds me of the way we love certain music, how no one quite knows how we came to be such dancing, singing beings, or what that does for us exactly.
What I mean to connect here is that what Banks wants our storytellers to frame, what Ellie recognizes, and what our cultural has frustratingly forgotten, is our connection to a real, substantial, and spiritual place.
I don't want to state this in a trite way, nor do I want to overemphasize natural landscapes. Presently, the resurgence of urban environmentalism, urban gardens, and favela/slum ecopragmatism makes it clear that an "natural" landscape isn't the necessary starting point for a social narrative of earthbound connectedness. If anything, these movements invigorate a variety of the social narrative in which earth, soil, life, biology, ecology, rootedness, and liveliness intertwine with pragmatism, problem-solving, population density/cities, cooperation, industry (in the broad, personal sense), and development (in a loose connotation). Notice that these are both concrete realities (soil and cities, for example) and intellectual objects (biology, ecology, pragmatism) and social-spiritual characteristics (life, rootedness, cooperation). It isn't a prescription for development, but a cord woven tightly from many, many threads composed of different materials; a cord that grows and strengthens in order to hold people, place, and spirit together.
Perhaps I speak more plainly of spirit than I am wont to do. But, ultimately, I think that the "object" of the world cannot be defined and obviously not articulated without the incorporation of spirit in some manner. Some friends and colleagues of mine, I doubt, would have much if any problem with incorporating spirit into this conversation. But it is less of a foundation for me and more of a girder, used again and again to refit, strengthen, and support the overall structure. That is in part why I began with the image from the BPRD comic (a spinoff of the Hellboy series). The conversation involves folklorist and historian Dr. Kate Corrigan and a mysterious rare books dealer in France, with whom they are exploring various artifacts of Medieval France. For the characters of BPRD--Hellboy, a demon do-gooder (inactive); Liz Sherman, a pyrokinetic; Abe Sapien, an extraordinarily long-lived aquatic humanoid; Johann Kraus, a disembodied median in a specialized containment suit; Roger, a Medieval humunculous; Benjamin Daimio, a mysteriously resurrected special ops soldier; and Dr Kate Corrigan--spirit is just part of the necessary means for explaining the world they experience, the world they have lived. Grappling, in their cases, involves a bit more than a hard materialist could muster for empirical explanation.
The conversation, you see, is not especially limited to the pages of the comic. What Ellie describes--and here I am synthesizing our conversations and her above comment--is not simply the physical reality of place, which would be something like making long houses in the Northwest because of trees and pueblos in the Southwest because of clay and stone. Rather, it has to do with the spiritual existence of a place and the things living therein. A personal spirituality and social mythology or soulfulness arises from the coexistence of place and people. Coexistence isn't exactly the word I mean; what I intend is more accurately a symbiosis or hybridization of psycho-physiological entities into one persona or community of personae.
What has often been missing in dominant Western cultures, which was been increasingly enforced since the Industrial Revolution, was a strong separation between person/personal identity and the location of that person in space and time. Of course, that space and time is relative to the individual's surroundings, which includes history, other people, animals, ecology, agriculture, and ultimately its future. Hawken tells the story of the Luddites and General Ned Ludd--a story with which I was previously familiar--in which a nascent social cognizance of a right to full employment is directly exercised. In addition, the mythical Ned Ludd manages to embody the role of land, employment, and labor that is manifested in the identities of displaced artisanal workers. The enforcement of such division would be easy in the face of truly atrocious child labor, unsafe working conditions, and short-lived employees. Suddenly, the symbiosis of person with land because person to work; not only is the partner distinct, but the preposition denotes a much more one-sided attachment. The work pulls from the person, takes the labor often at a horrible cost.
In addition, this new synthesis of person and other (land, work, etc.) is conceptualized as material interconnections. Bruno Latour has pointed out social and philosophical impacts of material-material dichotomies, but here I only want to emphasize the importance of material spiritual mutualism. I want to say more than I very well ought to. What I have in mind is a balance or imbalance between individual--described as having both material and ethereal properties, as well as internal and social, and so on--and some correspondent "mate." In one case, that mate is the land, rich with physical richness and diversity and a potent spiritual reality; the other case is work--distinguishable from labor by being an institution rather than an activity--with its extractive, capital-based notional infrastructure. By alloying ourselves with work, we even have the potential to redefine land in a work-based mental picture: Land is a place of resources for use, similar to a pool of potential employees.
The present predicament is more and more about severing the mental construction of capitalism--a set of resources that require extraction for capital meaning--and understanding alternatives. Indigenous rights groups around the globe are shouting for support and attention, suggesting an articulation of "The Rights of Mother Earth" so that social and environmental incongruities can be dismissed. I understand these endeavors as a hope to bridge a gap between a generally land-based philosophical picture and a generally capital-based philosophical picture. Unfortunately, the notion of rights is strongly built on a capital-based social reality--one of the first articulated rights was the right to property, i.e. the capitalization of land. The aspiration one can hold out is that this bridge ultimately segues the capital-philosophy to a land-philosophy or some manageable hybrid of the two.
These two psycho-social philosophies are means by which we can grapple with the world. They explicate the world as having certain characteristics, specific attributes that make it understandable. I cannot escape the notion that these mindsets are only tools for handling the world around us, with its rich and delightful and awful confusion. Again and again I am confronted by this strange and enriching and terrifying bewilderment. Whether it is through land or spirit or a breath of fresh air, I personally aspire to make better sense of it, to feel it more precisely than I am currently able.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
FastCompany Reading Material
I have been awful about keeping up with my newsfeeds. This, I would like to think, due to pressing creative opportunities and generally spending less time on the computer. One other obvious result is a scarcity of posting herein. If you are interested in the business of my days, I am interested in sparking up more penpals, so write me a letter! I would be happy to write back. Late last week, I also sent Miss Lauren Fulner a role-play letter, for which I eagerly await a response. I have already written on that sort of endeavor and want to call on more correspondents if anyone is interested.
But, back to newsfeeds, I have been spending this afternoon whizzing through the last month or so of articles posted on Grist and FastCompany. You can expect a Grist reading list shortly, but at the moment I am having difficulties accessing their website so that I might post the originals. In the meanwhile, if you need some intriguing distractions, check out some of these links. Normally, I post pretty frequently onto the tumblr, but I dislike spreading all of these out since it will basically happen all at once. Besides, this blog posts automatically to the tumblr. It is also a fine means for posting interesting photos, videos, and quotes from books I'm reading.
If you don't know about FastCompany, it is a design-based magazine with a rather vibrant cast of bloggers and journalists. They keep their ears to the ground for green innovations, sustainable design, interactive media, community art, social networking, and tech stuff. Often, it feeds the (I like to think) renaissance geek in me better than Wired, which can be a little too squee-intensive for me--though I try to follow Wired as well. So, enjoy!
Update on the successes of Denver's B-Cycle program - This program has really set me smiling. It has incorporated fantastic design elements, a simple and noble goal, and has apparently been joyously received. Community bikeshares can so easily become mired in the ins and outs of popularity and budgeting, that seeing some of the hype and news about B-Cycle is just inspiring.
The question internal environments of LEED certified buildings - I have become exceedingly skeptical and increasingly disconcerted by LEED certification and its shortfalls. A truly innovative green building certification organization, to my mind, would emphasize simplicity and integration to the gewgaws and pomp that LEED seems to entail. Now, all that new, inexperienced technology has the added deficit of negatively impacting occupant health? That makes the whole program that much more difficult to swallow.
Infographic of the Day: BP's Safety History - For many people, this will not be news; but, until recently, it was significant news to me. FastCompany's infographics range from quirky and funny to thoroughly disparaging. At what point does the government kick in and take the reins of such an atrociously managed company? Even if BP was so wildly successful at greening its brand--if not its actual company--that makes no space for a true failure to maintain safe working conditions for its employees and its surroundings.
A few words of lo-fi design - A playful article with images and video about the rising tide of lo-fi design. Simple and often childish interpretations of menus and the like come with such a delicious glee, I am glad to see it coming. Not only that, but I can't help but connect to the upswing in 8bit aesthetics or the indubitably enjoyable AT&T commercial featuring the song from Willy Wonka.
Augmented Reality game (ARG) senior thesis project with excellent video - Sooner or later, I will directly post the video on tumblr, but since that tag is causing me some grief, I'll post the link. This is a student's senior thesis at Parsons: A light-based, projected environment in which figures collect light to warm their houses, which attracts birds; meanwhile trees pop up around the light. It is an elegant sort of audiovisual tune well worth watching.
A sensually adorned room, replete with surrealist furniture and lighting - I had to post the picture, it is so excellent. Can you imagine the awkward moments of smalltalk on lip-shaped sofas? What about the fantastic innuendo of cocktail banter?
A New York City community art exploration project: Keys to the City - If you're in New York this summer, grab a key to the city and get exploring! This is a fantastically organized community art project in which the "audience" follows clues to various sites where your key to the city works. It also recalls urban exploration, a hiking-esque hobby of unearthing old avenues, tunnels, and under-appreciated sites within abandoned cities.
But, back to newsfeeds, I have been spending this afternoon whizzing through the last month or so of articles posted on Grist and FastCompany. You can expect a Grist reading list shortly, but at the moment I am having difficulties accessing their website so that I might post the originals. In the meanwhile, if you need some intriguing distractions, check out some of these links. Normally, I post pretty frequently onto the tumblr, but I dislike spreading all of these out since it will basically happen all at once. Besides, this blog posts automatically to the tumblr. It is also a fine means for posting interesting photos, videos, and quotes from books I'm reading.
If you don't know about FastCompany, it is a design-based magazine with a rather vibrant cast of bloggers and journalists. They keep their ears to the ground for green innovations, sustainable design, interactive media, community art, social networking, and tech stuff. Often, it feeds the (I like to think) renaissance geek in me better than Wired, which can be a little too squee-intensive for me--though I try to follow Wired as well. So, enjoy!
Update on the successes of Denver's B-Cycle program - This program has really set me smiling. It has incorporated fantastic design elements, a simple and noble goal, and has apparently been joyously received. Community bikeshares can so easily become mired in the ins and outs of popularity and budgeting, that seeing some of the hype and news about B-Cycle is just inspiring.
The question internal environments of LEED certified buildings - I have become exceedingly skeptical and increasingly disconcerted by LEED certification and its shortfalls. A truly innovative green building certification organization, to my mind, would emphasize simplicity and integration to the gewgaws and pomp that LEED seems to entail. Now, all that new, inexperienced technology has the added deficit of negatively impacting occupant health? That makes the whole program that much more difficult to swallow.
Infographic of the Day: BP's Safety History - For many people, this will not be news; but, until recently, it was significant news to me. FastCompany's infographics range from quirky and funny to thoroughly disparaging. At what point does the government kick in and take the reins of such an atrociously managed company? Even if BP was so wildly successful at greening its brand--if not its actual company--that makes no space for a true failure to maintain safe working conditions for its employees and its surroundings.
A few words of lo-fi design - A playful article with images and video about the rising tide of lo-fi design. Simple and often childish interpretations of menus and the like come with such a delicious glee, I am glad to see it coming. Not only that, but I can't help but connect to the upswing in 8bit aesthetics or the indubitably enjoyable AT&T commercial featuring the song from Willy Wonka.
Augmented Reality game (ARG) senior thesis project with excellent video - Sooner or later, I will directly post the video on tumblr, but since that tag is causing me some grief, I'll post the link. This is a student's senior thesis at Parsons: A light-based, projected environment in which figures collect light to warm their houses, which attracts birds; meanwhile trees pop up around the light. It is an elegant sort of audiovisual tune well worth watching.
A sensually adorned room, replete with surrealist furniture and lighting - I had to post the picture, it is so excellent. Can you imagine the awkward moments of smalltalk on lip-shaped sofas? What about the fantastic innuendo of cocktail banter?
A New York City community art exploration project: Keys to the City - If you're in New York this summer, grab a key to the city and get exploring! This is a fantastically organized community art project in which the "audience" follows clues to various sites where your key to the city works. It also recalls urban exploration, a hiking-esque hobby of unearthing old avenues, tunnels, and under-appreciated sites within abandoned cities.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
CC Addition
I finally made it around to adding something I have intended to do all along. If you view the blog proper--as opposed to via an .rss feed or the Facebook--you will now see at the top right, just under the title block, a Creative Commons license. That is, thanks to Creative Commons, I can now say that all material is is 1) shareable, 2) noncommercial, and 3) attributed to yours truly. I have done this because of the inclusion of recipes on the site--I want people to cook and bake with me, but would like for them to acknowledge where that came from--as well as personal writing--which is distinctly mine. The work of Creative Commons is very interesting and important. Coast around their website or, for something slightly more fun, read Little Brother by Cory Doctorow or Remix by Lawrence Lessig. Both deal with CC in challenging, playful, and very readable ways. My senior philosophy thesis was also heavily influenced by the work of Creative Commons--it would not be the sort of success it was without it--and I look forward to understanding and utilizing their work.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Foraging and Baking Adventures
I went blackberry pickin' out along Rock Island trail! This is something I have intended to do pretty frequently but have never made the time to do. Though many of the berries are falling right off of the tree--staining the sidewalk--the berries are, on the whole, still somewhat sour. But I picked them and they are good enough for me! Being out in the sun, noticing spindly green-bodied spiders, gentling the dark bundles from their stems, smelling grass and feeling the gradual shifts of temperature as the sun secreted around leaves. I basically loved it. My mother and I have gone berry pickin' for strawberries, but strawberries lay low to the ground and are hard for me to really attend. These, though, were tall trees with low swinging branches that were great for me to pilfer. Here are some pictures of my plunder:
And if you see some of those pictures and say, "Hey, those aren't berries," then you are of sound mind because the third photo is a simple wheat bread braided (seven strands) which turned out somewhat bland but very pretty and the last is a beer bread made with buckwheat flour. It is pretty good, but getting baking powder proportions right is somewhat frustrating for quick breads now that I am out of practice on them. Here is a recipe for the beer bread, or at least what I would base it on next time.
Buckwheat Beer Bread
2 & 1/2 cups buckwheat flour (or whole wheat)
1 & 1/2 cups white flour
1 cup oats'
2-3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup honey
Blend ingredients until you form a smooth batter. Heat oven to 350 F and grease bread pan or pans (I can't recall dimensions). Smoothly pour out batter into baking pans and bake for 50-60 minutes. If it begins to burn, cover with foil. It is slightly heavy and beery and pretty tasty.
Enjoy!
~~~
Final note: Miss Lauren Fulner will shortly be swept up in a collaborative fiction letter-writing "game" for which I am extraordinarily excited. Again, if anyone wants to "play" at role-playing via letter writing, whatever the context or plot, I will happily join you!
Now, off to celebrtate Miss Lacie Dougherty's birthday. Many happy returns!
And if you see some of those pictures and say, "Hey, those aren't berries," then you are of sound mind because the third photo is a simple wheat bread braided (seven strands) which turned out somewhat bland but very pretty and the last is a beer bread made with buckwheat flour. It is pretty good, but getting baking powder proportions right is somewhat frustrating for quick breads now that I am out of practice on them. Here is a recipe for the beer bread, or at least what I would base it on next time.
Buckwheat Beer Bread
2 & 1/2 cups buckwheat flour (or whole wheat)
1 & 1/2 cups white flour
1 cup oats'
2-3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup honey
Blend ingredients until you form a smooth batter. Heat oven to 350 F and grease bread pan or pans (I can't recall dimensions). Smoothly pour out batter into baking pans and bake for 50-60 minutes. If it begins to burn, cover with foil. It is slightly heavy and beery and pretty tasty.
Enjoy!
~~~
Final note: Miss Lauren Fulner will shortly be swept up in a collaborative fiction letter-writing "game" for which I am extraordinarily excited. Again, if anyone wants to "play" at role-playing via letter writing, whatever the context or plot, I will happily join you!
Now, off to celebrtate Miss Lacie Dougherty's birthday. Many happy returns!
Thursday, June 3, 2010
The Oil Slick and the Code of Hammurabi
Listening to Democracy Now! for today, as well as the satirical banter on the Daily Show and Colbert Report, each with their snippets from other news reports on the growing oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, I stumbled across an old memory. Now, I am neither a classicist nor much of an historian, but I do remember examining the Code of Hammurabi in something like freshman year in college. (I, of course, knew a little bit from history classes and television shows, but not much.) The Code, it turns out spends much of its length articulating rules for management and mismanagement of agricultural land. Hammurabi ruled over a land ruled by rivers, their floods, and the irrigation systems that supported a vast agrarian landscape. With these irrigated plains, the region was able to feed the early city-states of the region and if they failed, the hunger of the citizens fell on farmers and rulers.
Therefore, having articulated rules about responsibility for creeks and channels, their management, and the repercussions of poor maintenance makes a good deal of sense. First, Hammurabi would want to make sure his citizens are fed to curry favor and to have a generally healthy population. Second, if their is a grain shortage, pointing at someone to blame gets the heat off of the ruler or the grain merchant. If Joe's crappy channels flood into Margie's field and destroy her crop, guaranteeing that Joe pays for the damages is key to encouraging sound maintenance, maintaining crop yields, and having someone punished for damages to the commonwealth of the community. This rule of society--even more than the sentences for theft or battery--strengthens the infrastructure of the community itself, which relies on the regular success of the farming communities.
Wendell Berry likes to point out that regardless of claims of an "industrial age" or "information age," we are still, in truth, an agrarian society. Any civilization, as it is generally defined, is an agrarian society because without agriculture, there cannot be any civilization. (Note: This is not to deride the rich cultures of hunter-gatherer and nomadic societies, which I can argue--if inadequately--provide a counter-example to such an accepted definition of civilization.) With our draconian legislation on interstate and international trade, the highly intertwined development of global economic systems, and the rapid communications network encircling the planet, well, we can lose sight of the farms and farmers that feed us.
In the Gulf of Mexico, we can find a strong, long-lived economy based on seafood, particularly shrimping. This is founded on a rich ecology that has been worn down by seaside development, agricultural effluent from the Mississippi River, and industrial pollutants from oil and gas byproducts. Regardless, many families have continued to live like their parents and grandparents by fishing and shrimping in these waters.
What we are now engaged in is a failure to appreciate the ways in which we feed ourselves in an "industrial" age. Economists may happily argue that oil is worth a good deal more than shrimping on the market, therefore the risks and damages resulting from drilling, refining, and spills are worthwhile. That is, we can conceive of two economies set in competition to one another: An ecologically based fishing economy for feeding people and a geologically (though also a sort of ecological) based industrial economy. In an effort to encourage economic vigor, the legislation has supported the industrial as opposed fishing economy, resulting in rules like corporate payout caps for environmental incidents. In real economic terms, this doesn't make sense; it means favoring commodity production to sustenance production, driving cars over feeding ourselves.
In an economically simple society such as ancient Babylon, such an oversight would be impossible. The fuel that sustains our bodies is the same fuel that sustains the means of production and commodity production (whatever few commodities there may be). In a complicated economic landscape like our own, it is the result of overdrawing on an industrial system without proper recognition of the food systems that allow the latter to exist. If you can imagine it, the British Petroleum leak is very much a poorly managed "field" spilling into another "field," just as described in the Code of Hammurabi. Unfortunately, the rules for these economies are not plainly articulated in any way that necessitates the reimbursement on damages to the damaged economy. This is in part because the offending "field" is composed of toxic chemicals, not to mention the polluting "clean-up" chemicals as well, thus greatly increasing the subsequent damages. These damages are not a single year with some subsequent maintenance costs (rebuilding channel walls, levees, bridges, etc.), but ecologies that will require years, even decades to recover.
The management of damages and reimbursement is one of those generally accepted roles of government. It was decided by Hammurabi and his councilors almost four thousand years ago, and ought to be obvious today. Unfortunately, we are better and better at complicating these damages across multiple, overlapping and often competing economies. I use the term economies broadly here because economics is one of the best sets of tools for incorporating the inputs and outputs of social, environmental, and agriculture systems. That is, it recognizes the mutualist and competitive mechanisms at play when the arithmetic is done inclusively. The concern here is that legislation and prosecution will continue to wain in the wake of sheer corporate force despite strong ethical and economic arguments for corporate responsibility.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Collaborative Fiction
Anyone up for writing a game together?
Mr. Tim Loughlin has put the bug in my ear to try to play De Profundis, or some variant thereof. De Profundis is a sort of role-playing game in which to or more people write letters to one another as protagonist alter-egos. This is done explicitly in the HP Lovecraft mythos, with certain rules required for it to be played successfully. I don't have the rulebook or anything, but I am interested in playing a game, of sorts, of collaborative fiction.
Though I was better at maintaining correspondence in high school than I was in college, I enjoy letter-writing very much. The effort adds that certain personal flair and affection in an article that makes it all that much heavier and warmer to receive. If you are interested in sparking up a correspondence, I would enjoy it, but presently I am thinking of something a little different.
Is anyone out there interested in playing this sort of game? What I have in mind is, essentially, initiating an identity of sorts--someone who is or knows of a particular incident--and is hoping to discover something out with the help of another person--who perhaps is undergoing something similar. The "game" as it were, is extraordinarily open-ended and does not need to be horror-based, but suspense, I imagine, is a must. The end result is a sort of long-winded dialogue that builds up two or more characters and a larger event that happens between them and concludes only with the intellectual assistance of the other. Such a conclusion does not necessarily have to be positive, but it ought to be interesting.
Let me know.
Mr. Tim Loughlin has put the bug in my ear to try to play De Profundis, or some variant thereof. De Profundis is a sort of role-playing game in which to or more people write letters to one another as protagonist alter-egos. This is done explicitly in the HP Lovecraft mythos, with certain rules required for it to be played successfully. I don't have the rulebook or anything, but I am interested in playing a game, of sorts, of collaborative fiction.
Though I was better at maintaining correspondence in high school than I was in college, I enjoy letter-writing very much. The effort adds that certain personal flair and affection in an article that makes it all that much heavier and warmer to receive. If you are interested in sparking up a correspondence, I would enjoy it, but presently I am thinking of something a little different.
Is anyone out there interested in playing this sort of game? What I have in mind is, essentially, initiating an identity of sorts--someone who is or knows of a particular incident--and is hoping to discover something out with the help of another person--who perhaps is undergoing something similar. The "game" as it were, is extraordinarily open-ended and does not need to be horror-based, but suspense, I imagine, is a must. The end result is a sort of long-winded dialogue that builds up two or more characters and a larger event that happens between them and concludes only with the intellectual assistance of the other. Such a conclusion does not necessarily have to be positive, but it ought to be interesting.
Let me know.
My Review of The Lathe of Heaven, via GoodReads
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le GuinMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
When engaging in those frustrating discussions in which interlocutors use terms like "genre fiction" and say things like, "I don't spend much time reading genre fiction," Ursula K Le Guin is one of those authors I love to bring up. Whether it is in the political philosophizing and social theory mixed up in "The Dispossessed" or the queering and multigendering of the rich characters in "The Left Hand of Darkness," it is a cinch to argue the depth with which Le Guin crafts her stories, ideas, and characters. "The Lathe of Heaven" is another such book I can introduce into the discussion, but for slightly different reasons.
The style and prose of "The Lathe of Heaven" is less finely tuned than in the previous two works mentioned--which are surprisingly published on either side of "Lathe," 1969 for "Left Hand" and 1974 for "Dispossessed"--but that isn't to say it is poor. The work feels much more like Philip K Dick than I expected, pronounced both in its often more straightforward style as well as its surreal and delightfully paranoiac substance. Telling this story is decidedly more difficult, but it is assuredly well worth the effort. The difficulty arises from not only the multiple perspectives--George Orr, Heather Lelache, and Dr. Haber--but the multiple continuities or memories (Haber refers to them as continua) that these characters undergo. As I feel is the case with many Philip K Dick stories, the author attempts to portray the internal conflicts of the characters through the storytelling itself, which can make for a rough but potent ride.
Nearing the end of "The Lathe of Heaven," and more and more upon reflection, I wished almost for annotations and footnotes/endnotes on the text. In order to articulate a metastructure to the plot mechanisms at play, le Guin deftly incorporates vague references to mysticism, traditional beliefs--especially Australian Aboriginal folklore--and likely psychoanalytic and sociological theories. Such allusions, highlighted all the more by the introductory quotes in each chapter, shape the narrative but do not the least bit hinder the telling.
My gripes are few, but I could not set them aside, particularly having been so engrossed in other le Guin works. I cannot escape an alarming flatness in George Orr through most of the book; albeit, George Orr's apparent flatness is addressed in the thoughts and actions again and again, which is inevitably overturned by a more sympathetic reading and listening to his person. All the same, his inability to react with any real decisiveness until the axe blade is on his neck is rather painful. Similarly, Dr Haber's character is distressingly familiar, but the reader is forced to only ever identify him as a well-intentioned villain, a doctor with a shiny scalpel with which to reshape the world. An attempt to more finely humanize Haber would have made his character and his quest more sympathetic and his methods more unpleasantly palatable.
"The Lathe of Heaven" is indubitably successful. It comes with that characteristic le Guin panache, not to mention a delicious touch of SF inside joking. She tells a story rich with social concerns and the manic attempts to resolve them, but weighing in most on the impacts such endeavors have on the human spirit and personal identity. I cannot help but expect slightly more, but it does leave only very little to desire.
View all my reviews >>
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Strawberries and Cream Bread
I want to post more recipes, which means I ought to keep better records of what I am baking. This turned out rather light, slice-able, and has nice tartness from the strawberries.
~~~
Strawberries & Cream Bread
Starter
1 cup cream
1 cup warm water
1 & 1/2 Tbsp dry yeast
1 cup white flour
1 tsp honey (optional)
Blend together and allow to rest at least one hour. This ought to be very lively and I suggest making it in a medium mixing bowl.
Dough
2 Tbsp butter
1 generous cup strawberries
1 & 1/2 cup white flour
2 & 1/2 cup wheat flour, scant
(Note: I used fresh hard red wheat flour, which may have slightly different properties than store bought wheat flour.)
1/2 Tbsp salt
Add to the starter--the salt ought to be last--and mix together. Even if the tough is somewhat tough, the strawberries will release quite a bit of water. Knead briefly to incorporate all the flour and spread out strawberries. Let it rest for at least one hour, but two for a yeastier flavor.
(Note: I took my time making this bread, allowing it to develop a yeastier flavor. I gave it about two hours between each step, except for proofing, which happened in about 30 minutes.)
After resting, dust counter with white or wheat or a blended flour mixture and turn out. Knead until moderately smooth and divide dough appropriately--I made four small loaves, but two or three would work fine--and knead smaller pieces further before shaping into boules or loaves. Allow to proof on a greased baking sheet or loaf pan--to avoid sticking, you may want to roll the shaped dough on flour before setting it on the sheet. Proof for 30 minutes or so, then bake at 400 F for about 30-40 minutes; you may wish to turn the baking sheet or pan to bake more evenly. The top will become firm and hollow sounding when done. Strawberries will make the hot bread somewhat softer then the rest of the bread.
Enjoy!
~~~
Post-Script: A friend commented, "Where's the cream?" when I handed her a piece of bread. I might make a strawberries and cream quick bread soon-ish with whipped cream on the side. Who knows. There are abundant strawberries around these days, so it is likely.
~~~
Strawberries & Cream Bread
Starter
1 cup cream
1 cup warm water
1 & 1/2 Tbsp dry yeast
1 cup white flour
1 tsp honey (optional)
Blend together and allow to rest at least one hour. This ought to be very lively and I suggest making it in a medium mixing bowl.
Dough
2 Tbsp butter
1 generous cup strawberries
1 & 1/2 cup white flour
2 & 1/2 cup wheat flour, scant
(Note: I used fresh hard red wheat flour, which may have slightly different properties than store bought wheat flour.)
1/2 Tbsp salt
Add to the starter--the salt ought to be last--and mix together. Even if the tough is somewhat tough, the strawberries will release quite a bit of water. Knead briefly to incorporate all the flour and spread out strawberries. Let it rest for at least one hour, but two for a yeastier flavor.
(Note: I took my time making this bread, allowing it to develop a yeastier flavor. I gave it about two hours between each step, except for proofing, which happened in about 30 minutes.)
After resting, dust counter with white or wheat or a blended flour mixture and turn out. Knead until moderately smooth and divide dough appropriately--I made four small loaves, but two or three would work fine--and knead smaller pieces further before shaping into boules or loaves. Allow to proof on a greased baking sheet or loaf pan--to avoid sticking, you may want to roll the shaped dough on flour before setting it on the sheet. Proof for 30 minutes or so, then bake at 400 F for about 30-40 minutes; you may wish to turn the baking sheet or pan to bake more evenly. The top will become firm and hollow sounding when done. Strawberries will make the hot bread somewhat softer then the rest of the bread.
Enjoy!
~~~
Post-Script: A friend commented, "Where's the cream?" when I handed her a piece of bread. I might make a strawberries and cream quick bread soon-ish with whipped cream on the side. Who knows. There are abundant strawberries around these days, so it is likely.
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