Flash Mobs

Is it anger when individuals resolve by twitter organization to let loose anomic angst? Is it the resolve of a nation-state when cyber-attacks come in as though launched some superstar conspiracy-director qua Putin?

(Flag wavers need no direction, no do the money-makers)

Has it ever made sense to tie nations together with a currency, the Euro-busters ask. Is it really politely helpful to know my shopping habits and offer discounts for my direction? Who's directing whom here? Price is not my only modifier, I'd like to tell someone.

I anxiously await the screaming match which surely must erupt between Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman, and I assure you that this represents no libidinous displacement on my part. Plastic pneumatic toys do not attract me.

One does have to wonder how Ken dolls Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman stay civil in a room together. I suppose that's latent sexism to wonder. Well, they belong to the same club, the way that Bush and Kerry were both Skull and Bones. Women just don't have such long histories in the paneled corridors leading to the halls of power.

I learned today that selfish genes don't always rule: unrelated wasp queen wannabeeeezzzz can lay in wait to take over an entire colony when its queen dies. No anti-rejection injections required for this tissue transplant!

Reminds me of a joke I like to tell about Albert Kinsey, ideal types and WASPS. "It seems there was this paragon of high-salary one-of-a-kind leadership, who discovered that all of his speeches and memos - internal and external missives - were governed by such easily discoverable rhetorical constraints that a machine could have and probably should have written them. . ."

We pay our highest tributes, in salary or position, to those who can, somehow, channel what it is that's expected of them while still somehow managing the illusion of humanity. Look what's happened to Obama! His degrees of rhetorical freedom have been reduced until there's nothing much to separate him from a corporate CEO, a general's general, or for that matter his idiot predecessor.

I was warned not to fall for him, and it makes me really sad that I was too callow: too enamored of the sometimes great notion that there could be a leader . . .

We have resolved now - those of us who still make the trek to the public arena - into opposing teams. Our certainties have no more depth than do the thumbs up thumbs down of those once playfully and now deadly certain that the home team really should rule and death to the infidels (or was it the Christians?). I suppose that's because there is no way anymore to get to the bottom of any argument and so we go with something like our guts.

* * *

I am nearing the end of an extremely tiring summer. I have been straining to follow lively and highly nuanced  conversations in Chinese. This while I am struggling to master the political landscape of a university that's new to me.

And I do a good enough job that it's almost as if it's no big deal, what I've accomplished. I'm not talking about getting done the job I'm paid for, which has been plenty difficult. I mean that the trouble with being able to speak Chinese is that sometimes you're also expected to know the rules for drinking, for instance, which I don't. So you get measure by what you didn't do, or so the silence seems to tell you.

(Sometimes you run into someone for whom the university make sense, and you wonder how they could have so little sense of irony.)

Chinese drinking rules, it turns out, are incredibly simple. They can be taught with a few sentences as they were to me finally by a lovely young woman who could do it without insult.  Still, I feel vindicated that I hadn't been able to internalize the rules since in Chinese, I learned, they call their habits "drinking culture." Something barbarians like me might have a hard time with.

You might think "culture" would be reserved to describe more exalted activities, by you know the poets drank.In Chinese anyhow.

Strict rules for drinking are mostly observed by business-people for whom showing respect relates directly to deals accomplished. So, the kind of "culture" I'd like to internalize should be rather more nuanced, where rank ordering can shift depending on the honor claimed or bestowed or rebuffed and diffidently returned.

* * *

To hell with rules. But we have boundary issues all over the place now; 50 years after the crumbling of the Berlin Wall there are late discoveries that it also did us lots of good.

But the big bogus boundary is the one which we think keeps our mind within the confines of our head. Somehow - and honestly I can't find the reason - we think that the mind is contained within the brain within the skull. We think that we could freeze the brain, for instance, and then thaw it to find the mind intact.

The mind is composed, of course, of the innerings of various outerances from people all around us. Not just language-dependent, but language-constructed. Written tongues expand the scope, but the principle remains: there is no mind without its partaking communicatively, with myriad others. Which makes its bounding rather more difficult if not harder than the skull.

You know I struggle for compos mentis as much in English as I do in Chinese. Well, of course you know that! And I don't get the privilege in English to be supposed to know more than I reveal that I do in Chinese. In Chinese it's patently obvious that the language isn't harmonizing, quite, with the thought (whatever a thought can possibly be without the language of its expression).

As far as I can tell, I'm of at least two minds about most things. I know people who have more separation than I do between or among their various minds. Twins who split a mind between them also, conversely. And, as I indicted above, corporate leaders whose similarity one from the other might make you think they're clones.

Our striving still for authenticity or originality is misguided and perpetually will be for so long as we mistake self-contained for authentic. We must, of course, relinquish Western archetypes for God. Or at least we must not suppose God is quite apart from us.

We are not angered nearly so much by the thwarting of our will as by the violation of the archetype we inhabit. Neither God.

But, you know, serfer dude [sic] that I am now here in SoCal, I cannot impose by will that archetype on the universe around me. It will rather invest me with something that might become me. Willful people all look the same to me. Can you picture Mitt Romney surfing? Barbie and Ken only flex so far and then it's all dress-up over something which wears fundamentally the same face over the same rhetoric trying very very hard to win you over.

Verizon, amazingly, doesn't answer service calls on the weekends. That must be the best time to start a flash mob. To try for sense beyond sensation. When whatever once was called individuality is felt crushed out by impositions from faceless though differently branded archetypes, what is there to do but give oneself over to the wisdom of the crowd.

Or is it lunacy? Full moon. Full stop.

Holiday Themes

Time was I would post here nearly every day. Not so much anymore, now that I have a place in polite society again, gainfully employed doing something better than supporting the absurdly displaced lust for gadgetry to accelerate our lives.

It is true, though, that chasing after tail the way that IT guys do is good preparation for the insanely busy business of providing meaningful programming for export to Chinese educational tourists, which is what I do now. 24/7/365

It's my birthday though, and I feel positively hung over and wrecked from decompression on this my first day in many weeks with nothing on my schedule. I'm not going to clean the house, and I'm not going shopping unless I let loose some latent desire for new gadgetry. I sure don't want to blog! What a chore . . .

You know, I started my day with the LA Times, which is a new and healthy habit I have along with failing to each much meat and walking the dog for exercise. But there I was, distracted and working against that sense of guilt that I really should flip through the whole thing to find what's happening in the world.

Something about Harvey Milk in there, and I think I really should know if he's dead or alive - I saw the movie - and then glancing at the story there in the Times, I popped my forehead, duh! Of course, remember he was shot dead right there in the movie.

So I lay down the paper, but you know when you've had too much to do and suddenly you find yourself with nothing in particular that must be done right now, the entire mind, body and spirit continuum just lets loose or something and I feel like a really really old man. Or maybe it's just because it's my birthday? And I suddenly am a really old man?

Yesterday on their last day some very sweet Chinese students I'm hosting presented for their final project a look at Bill Gates as one among many "leaders" they could choose to analyze for the leadership qualities they'd come here to burnish. Since we in America now so evidently know so much about leadership the way that the Pied Piper leads little lemmings over the brink, maybe? Leadership! We'll sacrifice the globe for some idea, for chrissakes.

Bill Gates was quoted up on the screen. Stupid stuff like "find yourself on your own time, since no-one's going to pay you to do it." Or "there isn't any summer vacation in real life." He seemed to have a thing against school, you know, as though to listen to music or smell some roses were somehow a sin. And so maybe I sublimated that presentation from those sweet students and watched some music videos as represented by Time online as the best in history.

And you know, I watched a few and realized that everyone else was probably aware of these documents in their time, and I was just a dullard, like Bill Gates, assigning such stuff and nonsense no value. Certainly not enough to watch them through, either the first time or just now. But I think they were worth the investment, to those who invested in them just as Bonaroo might be or so my little-one tells me, though she herself was bored eventually, and hot and sticky and wanting a break.

But still I think I will do nothing. I don't know that Bill Gates has done anything worthwhile for the world, any more than Rupert Murdoch. I don't know why I feel somehow obligated to know the basic facts about what's going on in the world. There's no way to know that much detail and my brain deteriorates, which leaves not all that much for my mind to ride on. There's so much I can't remember, or at least can't call to mind with sufficient alacrity for it to matter if I could.

It must be that my mind does extend into all these little facts which my various smart devices allow me to check. Yes I know the date of Harvey Milk's death as soon as I can type or say the name and pause for facts' return to that little screen.

No doubt now, that Microsoft will soon re-dominate since they have their arsenal of patents and those patents' attorneys to force protection money from the competition, notoriously to the tune of $15 for each Android device. Which is more than Google makes. Which is zilch.

I wonder who's kidding whom? The Grand Narrative of the non-leadership classes would have us believe that government money spent goes down a rat-hole, though it buys us roads and clean water and safety regs. While the money spent on extortion rackets in the name of intellectual property law or real-estate bubble blowing for the sake of even further concentrations of wealth somehow gets to be thought productive!!!???

Yeah, so why bother, right? Why even pay attention at all? Certainly, why pick up the paper with any desire other than to flip to page 3, or where was that sexy music video among the brainy ones?

I know what I need to know, which oughta be enough. But I'm taking a break anyhow, and I don't really feel like going back to edit. So there. Peace out!

Biding Time - Happy Independence Day!

This is really strange. I have more work piled up than I can possibly accomplish, but it's July 4, and there is some sort of mandate to take the holiday. Plus I live in this cool California version of small town USA, and they do up July 4th like nobody's business. I've gotta partake. I can do a compare and contrast with my former digs in the New York State version of Dogpatch where they showed similar devotions from a wildly different context.

So I checked up here on my blog-space, biding time from working, and I found this entry languishing. It had been sitting there for well over a month, waiting for me to have a chance to look it over. I just launched the sucker, and what the hell!?

I never do manage to get things written the way they would be written if I had the right ability. Like I have this new friend who knows how to bend those spaghetti balloons into shapes which are almost too amazing to describe. The results are like what Chinese calligraphic painters can do with their brushes, to where a few practiced strokes might channel the particular qi of a cicada, say or a horse, and then even to a Western viewer, they have a kind of verisimilitude, which is nothing in the direction of photographic. That's what these balloons are like. Evocative of a rose, or a sub-machine gun or an elaborate hair-style.

That's the way I'd like to write.

Sometimes I wonder, what would happen if we named things not according to their phenotype or genotype, but according to the ecological niche they occupy. Hiking up the mountains yesterday, I was transformed and transfixed by the flowers along the path, regretting mildly that I did not know their names. But I wanted a name for the place they grow in, some demarker for the qi which allows their engenderment there.

Would language then deteriorate, or would we ourselves become that much less insistent that the function of our lives is to assemble as much experience to our Proper Name as we can muster. And then still expire disappointed at what we failed to achieve. Like novelistic mastery of the sort Frantzen credits Wallace with whose ex-post-mortem writings now are the subject of some embalmers art.

What if not to succeed that way were still to leave one rights as an instance of that energy which sometimes erupts in florid recognition, and sometimes simply makes the attempt, which some more idealized instance of the type gets picked for (ho ho)?

You know, I muse now that political rhetoric seems only to target those most susceptible to being sold on a slogan. WalMart shoppers, each of whom now has that precious one-person, one-vote and is feeling kind-of uppity about the privilege. We don't need no stinkin' interpretation!

We just bought an antique lamp, with the confidence to know that simply based on its construction and materials, its value was more than we paid for it. It isn't likely to go down, so why not put money there instead of in a bank account which won't even keep pace with inflation?

Most purchases solve problems; whether decorator problems or shelter problems or transportation problems, they lose their value instantly upon the act of purchase. Not so antiques, especially in the ever-new state of California where only aging gays and lovers of old houses and the WalMart flea-market types seem to be patrolling the aisles. Which is my type? What's my context,. what's my niche?

I think I'd like to see a political rhetoric targeted at thought leaders. Something removed from marketing hype enough so that people recognized their own incompetence to judge, the way we might with antique roadshow questions. We might be amazed, were we to have no reason to mistrust the judgments, at the value revealed.

Something we thought we understood well might be revealed to be a pig in a poke, manipulating our certainties the way that a practiced Chinese peasant does with tourists climbing along the Great Wall.

But I suppose my hope is hopeless. Rhetoric has gone the way of all flesh, toward meaningless and useless exercise of reflex desires. If it moves it must be edible.

Remember when libido was channeled into something like a Corvette? Now I see countless ads which have been reduced to the analog of flesh-shots which subliminally once channeled my desire for goods to enhance my style of life. Typically, they show four different flat-screens, one mobile, one tablet, one desktop size and one big screen.

These are the anything contexts. They can display text or flesh or moving pictures or put you in touch with a friend. You can read a book there, and you can let it flow across the screens, and you can let your mind flow, even, if you were to wish it, while walking in the mountains among wildflowers. There is no signal there. Thank God!

Consider the movement of the word, "technology." It has surpassed words like biology where the ". . . ology" denotes 'the study of.' Techniques for getting things done transmute from the study or even the enactment of those techniques to something which indicates some thing itself. Some item meant to embody something universal about techniques.

It's a thinging or reification like that long since done to "Science" as though that were some disembodied thought process which could be invoked in terms like "Science has long since discovered . . ." Long before that it happened, though from the other direction, to God which represented a striving for a Name for that which cannot and probably should not be named.

Technology is an empty construct, working almost the way that entrepreneurship does, which once quite properly referred to the process by which someone not quite scrupulous would work to relieve you of your hard-earned cash and to provide you instead with something rather more like a pig in a poke. As though technology solves any problems. As though it can be any more than an end in itself, to fascinate endlessly, to distract, to name in place of proper naming.

Rhetoric also once referred to verbal maneuvers apart from their earnest truth value. These were techniques for persuasion, apart from the rightness of the speaker's cause. Our politicians now, need it be said out loud, are the personality equivalents of technology, embodying nothing. There is no distinction among the wax figures, Mormon or lipsticked poker faces, one step from Scientological (properly so-called) batshit.

And this is that which I celebrate, blowing up July 4. Sound and fury signifying nothing. Hooray!!

Swirl of Cacaphony

I owe it to my punster bro that this is the name of a new Ben and Jerry's flavor. Artificially sweetened chocolate - fake cacao, get it? Cacao phoney?? With a twist.

I don't do puns. There's something wrong or right with my language black-box. I am back working though, this time using Chinese on a daily basis.

Since the Chinese has lain dormant for at least 15 years, and since this is a new job in a new state (of mind - California) and since I'm doing things which are somewhat new to me, I do sometimes feel as though I'm navigating a cacaphonic swirl.

I've been issued an iPhone. It works enough better than the Windows Mobile phone (the one I've been trying to talk myself into loving for so long now), that I almost can't credit it. I don't want to like a smartphone that much, but it handles Chinese natively, which is still a little better than I do, and moves seamlessly among tasks. I think they were smart enough to close off "multi-tasking" since you can only look at one thing at a time on a phone, and it keeps its state way better than Windows did, which was always trying to give me my cake and let me eat it too.

The Windows phone would try "intelligently" to decide how much memory I needed, but to a human there was no predicting when a backgrounded app would be closed according to some kind of better judgement, and its state might or might not be kept depending on the talents of the programming staff. At least Apple exercises some control over what will be allowed on their platform.

The one thing I do miss, however, is that Swype way of entering text. It's quicker, and I haven't learned to thumb on a virtual keyboard. But even still, there are limits to the turn of phrase one will attempt on such a tiny platform. I wonder when they'll make one I can dictate to reliably (ouch, turns out there's an app for that!)? Or something which can monitor my nerve endings maybe the way Kinect does my body movements. So I could just waggle my typing fingers, and the phone would take the cue.

'Till then, there can be no question that the language that we use is being lowest-common-denominatored. I've found that when I'm speaking English to someone I've spoken Chinese with, my English has become that kind of simplified that I often wish they'd use with me in Chinese. It's not that hard for a speaker to bring his language to within what can be followed with certainty, and not to do so would be some kind of rude.

And then if I email the same person, I find that I can't even access my native English stylistics, such as they are. I seem only to have a kind of pidgin - clear enough and precise, but lacking in the nuance which I do so enjoy while writing an email to someone I know well enough to skate the edge of sense with. Gentle Reader.

There's lots of celebration of the Twitter now, for the discipline imposed by such a compact package. No possibility to build any context from which the Tweet can be removed.

Once upon a time, we all learned to be careful with our emails since something about the medium prevented the careful tone with which paper letters once were invested. And bosses and colleagues and would-be lovers would take or give offense meaninglessly, because of a context wrongly inferred.

This defines our political discourse now, no?

Discourse is, of course, far too lofty as a description of what passes for it. Grand notions are reduced now to advertising slogans, obliterating all and any hope that opposing sides might be brought toward some kind of respect for the opposing position. At least I find that some familiarity with the origins of a position, and with the experiences of the people that hold it changes a lot about how you regard those people and that position.

Ad hominem becomes the order of the day, and so you match opposing viewpoints against what amount to cartoon caricatures as offered up by what passes for journalism. Photo and video mediated of course.

Our likes and dislikes are generated in the instant, upon first vocal and visual impression. How absurd to accuse the Obama haters of racism, when whatever happened happened in the same instant that we all formed our opinions of Sarah Palin. And I do try and I have to confess that, well, when I really try I can find Glenn Beck likable. I understand where he's coming from. I get Palin. I know they each connect with people who aren't making connections otherwise. Who feel excluded.

But to like someone is not to evaluate their job performance, right? And when someone else makes that mistake, then we hate them too. We generalize. We fill in all the context because the language we use simply isn't rich enough to provide for context.

And I guess that will have to be enough for this re-entry to my little private blogosphere, after a different kind f re-entry to the world of work. I'll end with a visual pun. I came across it during the course of my new work, where it behooves me to stay abreast of developments in Higher Ed.

I've been aware of modern logistics and warehousing operations for a while now, because of my work in IT. Big box distribution stores now use scan codes and robotics to store and retrieve pallets from their precise slots in massive warrens.

The California desert is dense with such places, each one employing very few humans, while the goods are moved from semi-trailer to shelf and back again using artificial intelligence to minimize latency on the shelf where money can't be made. But the shelves are valuable when they can facilitate volume purchase or taking advantage of price fluctuations. It must be a beautiful thing.

And now the University of Chicago, short of space, has built its new library underground, where books are bar-coded and stacked in crates. Robotic retrieval systems can move the crate to where a human can retrieve his written quarry. And it must be a beautiful thing.

But I have to wonder, and don't you? If the word is the thing, then why does it even matter that the physical object be brought to hand? This feels to me like some sort of bizarre and obsolete gold standard, and I feel my context-building prejudice machines resenting all the money spent to fetishize rare objects.

Shouldn't all this robotic intelligence be used to digitize the books before they're lent? Maybe it is and will be, but shouldn't it also and at the same time be made available to anyone anywhere, and not only to the folks at the University of Chicago with library privileges?

I remember when CD jukeboxes were state of the art, because so much data could be made accessible so cheaply. And now they just seem silly up against data stores so massive that the capacity is given away just for the asking. This library would seem the same kind of future obsolete, as new-age and high tech as it is.

I wonder if they will take my advice to call this travesty what it is - the Dead Letters Office from the long gone age of the missive. When people who wrote took upon themselves also the burden to create a context, and when readers were similarly obligated in return.

There is a design field of which I'm newly aware. It's called Ux or usability experience. It's masters design the interfaces between man and machine, and when you think about it, this is a very important business. One wishes that they would go to work someday real soon on the interface sported by the office copier/network printer/scanner/fax machine, but meanwhile these designers have become the analog to what teachers used to do.

They frame your interactions, as on my new iPhone now I'm constantly amazed at the generous gestures built in for my more fluid interactions. It's wordless, this framing, and therefore multi-cultural. Certainly, there's no need for translation, or, um, has it already occurred by the time the user interface is useful? Is the inter-language translation radically redundant by the time a "user" gets the interface?

Let me think here. Is the instrumentation on the user interface really somehow analogous to the role of the teacher? Some kind of formalization and channeling of the moves which might be made. And what of notions of active learning, or engaging the students with one another. Does that just go right out with the Windows?

There must be a difference between digital reality and real reality.

an iPhone for Your Thoughts

I have gone over now to the dark side. I'm working and I've been issued an iPhone, a thing I never would have bought myself. I'm distressed at how much techo-lust remains in me.

I find that it does Chinese in ways that Microsoft's stuff automagically drops out in their striving to rob everyone else's feature set, and skipping effort on the stuff which stays on most peoples' shelves. Or is that what Apple does, with their sweating of all the details of look and feel and I'm just suckered in with all the rest. What do they not want me to be able to do?

I feel a touch of sadness now to be retiring my old Windows smartphone, but I just can't imagine that I'll be using it anymore. Though its "push" email was a tad more alacritous than the iPhone's. I could customize in ways the iPhone won't allow. But I'm afraid it's the Apps. The pinch to zoom and the slick way the parts all integrate.

I suppose I should be worried about the tracking, but, well you know I just learned this fascinating little tidbit I've been puzzling about since I moved to California and have to navigate these massive Mighty Niagara (nostalgic nod to canoeing in Buffalo) traffic flows. Doesn't everybody wonder? You know, how does Google maps get "realtime" traffic information?

I feel embarrassed. I'd been imagining hoards of recruits who call in their observations, and maybe money changing hands to pay for some company which has a service to monitor roadways with cameras or traffic detectors (it's true, there are such things! Which travel to your TomTom over FM channels or some such malarkey). Maybe the government makes a little money off its police reports?

But no, it turns out that this is a really cool form of crowd sourcing, where all these drivers with their location-aware phones are sending up their movements to the mother-processor, and rest assured, we're all anonomized in the cloud because, as usual, they only care about us in aggregate.

So now while I'm fighting off my urge to get an Android in my hands so's I can see how Google's anti-style stacks up against my iPhone, I ponder this: why does it feel so dangerous to question the morality of offing Osama Bin-laden without so much as a nod to a military tribunal? Is it just simply that safe now for our Commander in Chief to read our minds?

In a court of law, would there be mitigating circumstances for the radicalization of a man who'd once thought he was our friend? If he ordered the killings, then surely he must die, but what about specialist Manning now rotting in his cell for aiding and abetting the enemy? Shall we just not bother to hold our leaders accountable to the higher standards of law, since they know what we would want anyhow?

What really worries me though, is that everything has been turned into a kind of digital on-off to where you're either Republican in your thinking or Democrat and these trends tend to polarize us even internally. What happened to leadership whose job it was to raise the level of discourse to where each side could see the reasoning of the other? Isn't that what Obama promised in and by and during his campaign?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not terribly bothered that Obama's been dispatched, but I am bothered that the reason for his dispatch is about the same as the so-called birthers' reason for hating Obama. They just do. But now isn't Obama guilty of extra-judicial killing? What's the statute of distance between a man and his exalted position and the actions committed in his name or by his order? Policemen aren't allowed to shoot someone even though they might have directly witnessed a capital offence. What should we allow secretly to be done in our collective Name?

How do we feel assured that the narrative about the events as they occurred wasn't being tweaked according to our reaction, and facts trickled out or altered according to the traffic flows. There sure are a lot of stories about our enhanced investigative and other special ops techniques. We crow, we crow!

Oh yeah, and I heard this (on NPR, of course, or no, maybe it's in that podcast I refer to above): there is this new virtual french-kissing device that someone's rolled out for fun. You put a virtual tongue in your mouth and then while you're face-timing with someone you'd like to kiss and they have the same device in theirs you can feel each others' wiggles in your respective mouths. Ew!

I know the guy who has a patent on that. I'd better alert him, as though intellectual property could actually belong to someone anymore (I'm of mixed mind!). Meanwhile, you know where this is going, right? While we're all distracted by making virtual love to some Candy-2000 model hot body, the government will already know what we think we want, and then they'll give it to us without our even asking. Click to sign-off, and hey, you can't complain.

Like the other day when I got my free credit report DOT COM and then I stupidly signed up to get my free score because I could cancel at any time. But it took holding for over an hour before someone finally  answered and the scumbags still have my credit card information. Which was a pristine new number since I'd had to cancel the old one for apparent fraud.

Oh yes, I am so thrilled now with my new iPhone!!!

What a world!!

That Last One!

That one was sitting there for weeks and weeks, while I got into the swing of working again. I'm almost there. Look, ma, I'm writing again! Wheeee!

I went to the LA Times Book Fair at USC yesterday, and stood in line, standby, to hear Patti Smith and David Eggers talk about the writing process. I was flanked by professionals. That was cool. Although I was distressed that Patti Smith seems stuck in the specialness of being an artist, and the ridiculous notion that artists strive to realize things which come to them clear in their minds. And then they do the work to realize those visions.

But Eggers, you know, quietly put the lie to that and talked gently about his teaching process, and I think he was a lot more honest about how the medium pushes back and so does the reader, even if it's you the writer that's standing in for the reader, and he seemed to think that anyone can write, which pretty much dethrones the Artist as some kind of special person.

Patti Smith was talking about how artists are burdened by having to be commenting all the time in their head, as though writing stories about what they are living through, as though that's not actually the human condition and doesn't distinguish her from anyone on the planet. It doesn't, but I haven't read her stuff, and it got a big award, so I'll have to grant that she's as good as all that, and I'm glad to have heard her, but even more glad to have heard Eggers, because I think we're all really congratulating ourselves still for recognizing cool when we see it, and he seems to have moved beyond that.

I like this Chinese semi-dissident writer I read about in the LA Times this morning, who criticizes Ai Weiwei for maybe mis-taking that New York state of mind where everything has to be edgy all the time to be legitimate, as though just being shocking were being free.

And I'm certain that I love and support Ai, even though I don't know his work either. But I do think he's too much into the idea that information just wants to be free, which is what Ariana Huffungton thought so that she could make millions off the backs of bloggers who just wanted the exposure her site would give them.

Here's how free I think information is. When we think information is free, we cheapen it to the point that it's meaningless, just like when we think that we need to be credited for inventing things which were in the air, but we got there first, we make of ourselves a fool against eternity. Information is what you do with it, and so HuffPo descends, sometimes, into the realm of the National Enquirer when it used to be all that, and sometimes random lonely bloggers without an audience have things to say. But I self-aggrandize, and so . . .

For instance, I think when we email we are doing something like what I've been doing talking to people whose English is about as good as my Chinese. I simplify. Not just my vocabulary, but my tone and pacing, and if I'm writing an email to someone I don't know, I take out all the nuance such as I would use to a compadre who knows me well.

If I write to a friend, I could write freely, writing to someone who knows me well, and fill my writing with what I consider style and feel pretty good about how much I managed to pack into a phrase, though even then most times people won't bother to read it closely.

Still I'd rather my writing over-reached, than was always forced to strive for the lowest common denominator so that it will certainly be understood or at least not misread to the detriment of all. And while I'm writing this pidgin style I find that I no longer can tell how I might change it. I can't find the style I would have used if I weren't cramping it so much.

Like, you know, when I'm writing to someone with whom I speak Chinese, but neither of us is as good as native in the other person's native tongue, then my own writing descends into a kind of reduced form, and I can't even come up with natural phrases and so everything looks Chinglish, even my own writing. I think that's about the state of the world of language right now. The opposite of Babel is not perfect harmony. It's the loss of any communication with anyone at all because we're all saying the same thing all the time.

Well, as always, that's worth about two cents.

Stunned Silence

I watch the cat, asleep, the tip of her tail moving like a creepy worm, as though it were a different animal altogether. You won't be reading much here. I'm back to work. I am overwhelmed by too much to read and to digest. I have to dive in to the deep waters of Chinese again. There isn't much time. I'm tired. I can't think through the haze of pain from repetitive stress, or stress, or a pinched nerve, wages of age.

I remember the first time someone showed me his cell phone, and I couldn't believe it. I hadn't realized that it might make sense to distribute the towers such that this radio would always be within reach of one. I hadn't yet worked for the power utility which already had such a system to hand off signals among antennas so that linemen could always be in touch.

I watched an HD movie last night, streaming over the Internet, because I had nothing left in me to do a single thing more. Work is exhausting. It robs me of my mind in just the way that there is no presence among the endless swells of well-crafted writing, mediated by enough capacity to stream high-def video, and probably 3D if I were to care about that. There is no sense in trying to make sense. There's too much.

I care about what David Foster Wallace writes, even if he wasn't around to put it together this tax day. I care about what John Stuart has to show me, and us, and them, about what people are saying in the world around and about me that is so mind-numbingly stupid that all that is required is a context and it speaks for itself.

It's charming, or it would be, how many people hold on so earnestly to opinions and even certainty which make about as much sense as to read the Bible for literal Truth. But they do. And David Wallace didn't care to keep us company, walking off the stage because no one cared anyhow, and the show was what was to each side of each of them and not where the spotlight shone.

Left, right, center, people hold onto beliefs and opinions and certainties like dictators holding onto power in the face of awakening masses of humanity. Which won't be managed until enough of them shut up already about stuff they believe in which makes no sense. Like that regulation of our predations hurts us in the end. That rich people didn't get lucky and shouldn't be taxed for it. That we have to be bankrupt and it isn't our arrangements for modulations of emotions through financial transactions, like how much would you pay for that experience?

And I am a cellphone now, a robot, my power is all distributed and I am just a receiver, and can transmit only as far as the nearest repeater. Sometimes I wish I did have a tail which would wag itself while I sleep. It could signal that I still live.