...how i spent my summer staycation, part 2...

Even if you go to stroll in the sand but once, and that once being on Staten Island,if you take along a bit of text to relax with, it qualifies as a "beach read". Which, believe it or not, has become a subject for argument and, to wit, this entry.

So then, blogging (a subject explored heretofore...somewhere in heretofore) notwithstanding, the Electronic Lifestyle has become the gravity center of our Gutenberg Galaxy (and yes, I know: "Stop with the McLuhan refs all the time! We get it! You think the guy walks on water!") and not just in the obvious (like Facebook, natch--in which I must steadfastly decline to participate--and porn--which is always a novel experience--and Youtube, tho' not that much different from the former two and perhaps even a logical extension of them) ways.

(That should be enough parenthetical inclusions for one sentence. And this dispatch, I think.)

At some point or other, the whole issue of Darwin's theory will be addressed, and what it specifically means to the physiognomy and "mindset" of the species. But at this juncture, it seems appropriate to bring up as this entire entry is going to be limited to three items only, and open news items as well so there will be online links--YES! LINKS!--to their origins. Why? Well, because it worked for Darwin...is not enough justification, but a nice co-incidence. But more, because triangulation, in the traditional X, Y, and Z axises, is the natural method for locating anything in space and time, more or less, and applying the same to the social environment is a no less-viable model. This is one thing I have learned from all the science writing I've been soaking up for the past few years: we may think "about" subjects but we think "with" models. So, the reason I apply this model is that, while the subjects are actually all part of the Electronic Lifestyle, each one is part of a different "media". Hence the continued "Marshal arts" stuff.

First up, a device. No, not the ubiquitous phone/PDA variety, but Kindle. The way to tell that something in on the crest of a wave is when you, as I did, start noticing them more and more on metropolitan public transportation: subways and buses. When I got one, it was just before the price reduction, so I attribute the almost overnight blossoming of them--out of bookbags, purses, pockets, etc.--to their descent to the level of impulse-purchase affordability. So, now they are now everywhere, like a sunny spring after a wet winter in Death Valley, and in a similar profusion of colors, covers and configs.

However, there is also a meaning behind this: people who own them are reading more than they used to. The article referenced here [LINK ALERT!] is merely a confirmation of other observations as noted below, but it needs to be cited for two very distinct and dissimilar reasons: the first is germane to this particular entry; the second I will get to in a subsequent missive. For now, the only observation worth quoting is that in a Marketing and Research Resources study of 1,200 e-reader owners, 40% said they now read more than they did with printed matter, with the remaining 58% staying about the same. How significant is this? Depends upon the totality of your grasp of its implications. The 40% are simply saying "more", not how much more or what more. And, as well, the other 60% simply register no change, without being asked to distinguished if there is a difference between what they read on their device from that which they read in print, such as periodicals or website entries in any greater number, and not segmented into print/electronic media categories. This would be a much more interesting bit of data, but the subject of the article is limited to e-books only.

Owing to a near-total antipathy and well-nigh aversion towards possessions, I found the idea of a digital book something close to the perfect solution. Now, being a rather economically-minded individual, I did not especially want to give bookoo bucks to amazon.com to build up my library. So, the other convenience is that there are enough online sources--such as the Gutenberg Project (see! relevant!) (ok, so one more aside, everybody needs some slack) (ok, so that's two, and this make three, so STOP THE MINDLESS PROLIFERATION OF REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM MISE EN SCENE GOING ON LIKE HIV IN A T-CELL-LESS CIRCULATORY SYSTEM!!!!!) (Really, it was a ridiculous restriction from the giddy-up...)

Where was I?

Oh yes. Also, Google has out-of-copyright volumes in a variety of formats (.azw, .mobi, .etc, etc.) and there's a few net-based fan-blogs such as this [LINK ALERT!] one which uses the legal fiction of sending "reviewer" copies (which isn't really such a canard, at least here, as I expect to make further commentary on same at some point in the future). Further, after MUCH experimentation, found some free apps out there to convert files from one system to another. [TIP...not parenth--nevermind. Kindle likes .txt files. They are the simplest there are and can be created by scanning in books through an OCR program. And, if you have B&W pictures as part of the package, or charts or graphs, opening the same through a web-based app, like Firefox, and saving the whole as .html or .htm, is an ideal setup for an app called Kindle Creator which turns it into a very nice volume-sans-volume.]

The point of this is to point out that any prejudice towards e-books as being too limited is ludicrous.

But that's not fromm whence the major objections stem. Friends of long-standing and recent acquaintances, when informed of my choice of new media, have had reactions from raised eyebrows and wrinkled noses to expressions of disbelief and downright disgust. The accompanying statements are, as you would suspect, along these lines.

a) Oh no, I like to [curl up in bed, settle back in the armchair, linger at the coffee shop over--fill in your favorite furniture/ideal locale] and I just couldn't with a _______.

OR--

b) I just like the [feel of the weight, turn of the page, smell of the paper, PLUS: the endpapers, the binding, the covers, etc.] and its just so [cold and antiseptic, impersonal--as in the same font for everything--and it changes the text and uses buttons, etc.] and it would change the reading experience too much for me.

OR--

c) I like having a wall full of them, just to stare at, and then go over and pull one off the shelf, like getting re-acquainted with an old friend, or making a new one.

There are other responses, of course, but they are all pretty much variations on these themes. And it must be acknowledged that they are all valid aesthetic/ethic choices which cannot be disputed. Yet none of them addresses the essence of the reading experience, at its core:

d) The interpretation of symbolic representations of bound morphemes (the substance of spoken words) into complete and easily assimilable units of data to be transfered to an individual's consciousness to entertain or inform and hence, perhaps, lighten one's burden of life or illuminate a particular aspect of same.

Admittedly, that's pretty clinical, and it is supposed to be. Like Darwinian theory, it comes down to just a few basic laws that, when stripped of all the hoo-hah whipped up by mouth-foaming mysticism and religious rant cant, amounts to something as easy to understand as physics or geometry. When you read a book, it can be a), b) and c) individually and severally, but nonetheless: you would not be reading it if d) wasn't at the end of it.

My friends are not, as a rule, neo-Luddites into smashing machines for taking away that which was precious and permanent and replacing it with that which is disposable and transitory. And yes, it is easy to delete files from the Kindle. And easy to add them: click & drag. Does this take anything away from the writing though? This is not the dispute: it is the media.

I then pose the question of exactly WHEN it became an issue? Ah! There's the rub. And another LINK ALERT! OLDNEWSFLASH: "By the end of antiquity, between the 2nd century and 4th century, the codex had replaced the scroll..."

Ok. So drift back with me to, oh--say, the court of the Emperor Constantine. So, here we are at the Dardanelles, the crossroads of Europe and Asia, somewhere between 306 and 337AD. You just get told: we're scrapping the Roman Gods and going with Christianity.
Oh. Well, fine by me; never liked all those burnt offerings...though will miss some of the paeans, like Virgil, sure.
Don't worry about him; we're going to keep him on as a pagan saint, and he'll turn up later in Dante as a rehab. Oh, and we're getting rid of scrolls and going with codexes.
Now wait a minute! Or a quarter-inch on my sundial, at least. I like my scrolls! I like the way the papyrus curls. I like the way it crackles and gets all tawny after a while. I even like the knobs on the end! And my whole library is full of circular pipes! How am I going to fit these...boxes...in? These 'bound-volumes'...they're just a fad! No, no. That's fine for the kids, but not me!

(Yes. I rather liked that bit too.)

Old habits die hard. What's worse, however, is old furniture, it would appear. But resistance to change should be for things of value--not objects of value. Yes, after the apocalypse (or the Rapture, if you number yourself among the descendants of the people Constantine converted in his big HRE upgrade to State Religion 2.0) you can't read a Kindle: no power. Right. Didn't see many people in "Mad Max" or "Beyond the Thunderdome" really ensconced in Cattalus or Voltaire, did you? And how many hardbacks did you see dad shlepping along with son on "The Road"? Reading, then, is truly a luxury of civilization (and reading cartoons, where representations of the Prophet are concerned, only of Western civilization.) The argument for the permanence of printed matter is logical only insofar as you have a public with the leisure for study of the material. Or, as I believe Oscar Wilde put it so well: Giving a man a book is an impertinence, unless you also give him the time to read it.

There is an alternative, however. I am reminded of a favorite book of my youth, "Farenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury, making the case for him being one of the finest allegorists of our day but most certainly one of the ABC's of science fiction (Asimov and Clarke being the other two way back when). The "Book People" were forced to give up physical volumes and commit their most beloved work to memory; in essence, turning themselves into biological equivalents of e-readers. This was then, and remains today, an utterly beautiful concept. Yes, they DID love their covers/paper/bindings/endpapers/ink/fonts, but once they were forced to make a choice, they opted for containing the KNOWLEDGE OF THE TEXT. As in sex--carnal knowledge of. As in...it fucks with your head to think of a book about books being destroyed to keep them meaning can you keep this book by memorizing it to repeat back to others and, if so, does that violate Bradbury's copyright?

I could go on and on but really this is enough. Thesis stated, logical reasoning, proofs and supports. And a few yucks on the side.

That is all said to say this: Darwin.

Yup. Natural selection and adaptation. That's all it is. Put them together, make it in plain speech and it sounds like this: the world of reading has changed, and changed more than once. It has evolved. Sometimes you make a choice to resist; sometimes you go with the flow. If it doesn't matter to you how you do it, have no particular aesthetic barriers or prejudices, then as long as it enters through the eye, in the medium of sentences (unless its poetry), its fine.

But if you need to get all tactile on my ass, fine. Get yourself a crimson Louis Vuitton faux-alligator wraparound. Yes: an accessory after-the-fact artifact!

October is the time for catch-up ball in the extreme

Another hiatus, another afflatus. At first, it would have been 'coming to terms' with the nature of the Blog: spontaneity. Then, it was the words themselves: chosen? found? Finally, some sort of arrangement of them into... Ok. Not that it matters, but it occurred to me that if I wanted to say something, it might sound better than just blowing in the wind...

The trick of talking and not saying anything, and garnering a lot of attention, is easy. Look at Glenn Beck. So much is written about him and his fantastic ravings that the essential picture is being missed. There is a philosophical method of argument called, loosely, "the sacrificial straw dog". In this, you simply set up an extreme that is wholly outrageous and then allow other people to take note of the obvious: why, he's insane! Then you can say: of course he is! Now you can't really compare him with me!?! Can you? I'm the reasonable one...and therefore, whatever arguments you make that are just as insane, but couched in calmly, must be considered as valid. Even when they are ludicrous.

Another illustration of how such a ruse works can be seen in the health care debate. By letting semi-pro flacks and rabid-rousing radio rangers ramp up the rhetoric via lunatic fringes of crowds, while placing "outside agitators" (amazing, no?--that was once used during the civil rights' marches era to describe voting and poll workers and lunch-counter sit-ins with 'yankees stirrin' up our colored folk', etc. such it is how the wheel goes around) inside town halls, the "silent majority" (another jaw-dropper, eh?) is effectively negated. The content (conservative think-tank tick-tock disguised as fervent homespun stories of heartland issues forgotten by the Eastern Standard Liberal Establishment) isn't at issue here, and neither is the form. It is in the summary.

But that's not where I wanted to begin.

I wanted to start by listing some books I'd read. Then I thought: that's really tooting your horn, isn't it? That said, I'm blowing the whistle on my ambitions; the way out of the labyrinth is showing the tracks and letting others follow if they have a mind to, if so inclined. However, there is also the beauty of the track in the snow. The best way to do that is to make a case for some startling models of classical physics which could translate into quantum mechanics: Mandelbrot's fractals and Cantor dusts. Equally, that Primo Levi's meditation on the periodic table of Elements is a God's-eye-view of what scientists call 'metals'--which should be touted as same by the 'Intelligent Design" school, if they had a whit of wit betwixt them. And, moreover, how the Theory of Evolution and the General Relativity Theory seemed to both be on the same track to the same laws, and we could see them too if only we had more perspective. On the other hand, the curiosity of how the same relationship pattern runs through so many peak-bonding and break-ups among French men of arts and letters--Robespierre and Danton, Camus and Sartre, Godard and Truffaut, Debord and Lefebvre--that you might think it also display some kind of law, but would be even more hard-pressed to find one out of those pairings than the Darwin/Einstein connection.

But then I thought about Jim Carroll.

Here's one or two things I know about him.

Back in the day, I'd interviewed him and written about him for a couple of mags, and was on what we call a 'nodding acquaintance', like: when I see you I make eye contact and offer the briefest of head jogs, just to say, I acknowledge your existence. And that exchange would be every year he'd show up to the St. Marks Poetry Marathon on New Years Day. For the last few, it was pretty much excerpts from his book, his first real novel. It will probably be published soon and I'll buy a copy like everyone else. But when I read it I will hear his voice. I always hear his voice whenever I read his words. Halting, almost at the edge of a stammer, reedy as befits an Irish Catholic Boy, and with the faintest taste of whistle. He had a similar way of addressing the mike, preferring the stationary angle-poise fixture to a hand-held, always rocking it forward and back--no different between slinging it onstage at the Ritz or Irving Plaza or at a quiet reading. At one time he WAS All-City and played against a really tall black rail named Lew Alcindor, who we now know as Kareem Abdul Jabbar. And according to Jim, "I may not have been able to smoke him, but he'd get game all the same". See? Modest too? "It wasn't the heroin that seduced me away from basketball, but poetry." And in no way in love with death, or maudit morbidity, despite junkie-saint persona in the press, and all the hoopla surrounding the Columbine incident. He'd rather talk about Love, carnal and eternal, like Abelard and Elouise. But all people seem to really use is his own ready-made-for-MTV-memorial (well, probably VH1, these days) obit, the soundtrack of which be on every commercial-break bumper outro: "Those Are People Who Died".

I prefer to think of how he lived.

Which brings me to what would appear to be an idiotic comparison; all the former rhetorical jizz vs. a guy who makes love with the muse. Not quite, yet; it is the stuff in between that is what matters. In between what? Those subjects...on this page. So let's examine the latter first. Jim would talk street (which is now "ghetto"? or "hood"?) but also come up with dazzling classical refs and do it in the course of the same conversation, even same sentence. When you say, 'I hung on every word', that's just what that means. You never know where the next turn of phrase will take you so you'd better pay attention. That's the kind of speech (not in the sense of "prepared" but the general one of spoken language) I enjoy the most, and which, coincidentally enough, is also the subject at the core of Information Theory.

That's the stuff in between, the stuff I read. (Yes. I know. Didn't expect that, did you? Honestly, that's the fun of this: neither did I.)

When Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver came up with the whole shebang at Bell Labs in 1948, it was pretty arcane stuff. At the core it was the measurement of Information Entropy, which "quantifies the uncertainty involved when encountering random variables". If this seems too far afield of the subject, just accept that this is the basis of packet-switching, which is the sum total of what actually happens in this service called the Internet. The essential idea to get, for the purpose of this essay, is the comparison of two packets of data, seeing what doesn't match in the other, and then figuring out whether that was an error in transmission, or new data to incorporate. Today, it boils down to what has entered the common usage as "signal-to-noise ratio". It actually has an even simpler manifestation: the Surprise Factor. What led me down this bizarre, jagged path was Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan". In it, he was describing how much space/room/storage/volume (whatever) it took to convey something like, well, his book--to illustrate the point. On every page, it seemed, he was taking turns into history and philosophy and mathematics and economics and even popular culture that could neither be anticipated by what preceded it nor dismissed as immaterial to what succeeded it. You needed almost as much space to get everything in it IN IT as there was in it.

(That last bit sounds a tad desperate. Or maybe impassioned? Let's leave it at that.)

Taleb cited Shannon and Weaver as saying much the same. To recap the previous, the whole issue of 'transmitter/receiver' is important only when the transmitter has more information than the receiver. The receiver can have all this data, and it can be complete, as far as its particular set goes. (I will not digress into set theory here except to say that's the part about this that led to Cantor sets and, hence, Cantor dusts. Yeah. Not today.) But, when the transmitter sends something new, that is a surprise. And not only that, it changes things: the parameters of the set, the organization of the data, the priorities, even 'what you know'. Sure, that all goes without saying. And something else that goes without saying: EVERYTHING ELSE!

This is where the other part comes in. Unless you are speaking only to a population composed entirely short-term memory loss patients, you do not have to repeat everything every time! Stop the presses, break up the front page and get out an extra: nobody cares if you are a talking-point parrot! At least nobody who has any self-respect. The aforementioned with the attention spans of ants may be what keeps your ratings up but, outside of the 24-hr cable circle jerk, this doesn't even count as high as yesterday's papers: you can't wrap fish in them or line the bird cage. Yet, there they are, always in your face or ear, buzzing about things which have no value of any kind because they are not enduring truths but merely enduring signals, caught in a loop like Bernie Maddoff walking out of 500 Pearl Street, accompanied by his attorney and the media pack, for the last time. They run that footage (along with his one shove of an obnoxious cameraman) over and over because they don't have anything else to fill in the time. And the only reason they stay on the air for people stare at is that they don't have anything else to fill in their lives.

This is not 'News'; this is something like 'Olds'. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking of it as it is labelled, but it needs active resistance. I will admit, learning to ignore that which offers nothing new requires a lot of discipline. Kinda like not turning your head when an attractively-attired teenaged member of your desired gender-group passes on the sidewalk. I would be remiss not to admit that I will still have occasion to watch Olberman or even Maddow, despite my pledge to only attend to Stewart, as I find more honesty in comedy than comity in honesty. Who needs the agita?

Now, to get back to the alternate. A poet requires much more attention, given. And there's nothing even vaguely au courant about a bound volume. You are not going to be able to offer commentary on, oh, say, some local municipal scandal, or outrageous testimony before a Senate subcommittee, or even a special report on sex-slaves in the Suburbs! No, you are going to have nothing to say which anyone would be interested in as your take on the pre-digested pap and "press-play" press releases disguised as reportage. And isn't that awful? But you will feel a whole lot better about being powerless...and you may even find some power in that. I have to admit, I hadn't picked "Fear of Dreaming" off the wall in a while. It was strange, though, how only a few pages in, I am walking on a beach with Carroll as he ruminates on romance and mortality, using flash images of sky and waves to put me, perhaps, in the same Coney Island Of The Mind that Lawrence Ferlinghetti did for us both, how many ages ago? And that's a surprise because it isn't the same waves and the same sand and the same walk as the last time, but it is just as engaging.

And his voice lives in my head; even as a vague outline of an awkward crow casting shadows on my wall. I am not hiding my head in the sand of his beach; I am paying attention to that which offers me information--real information. It may be objected that, "Oh, you're saying that art is preferable to Life! Sure! But I have to live in the REAL WORLD, chum!" Uh-huh. Like just because something is broadcast over airwaves by living humans, that this somehow constitutes "Life", the "REAL WORLD"? Try swallowing a little quantum physics and superstring theory and then tell me you know what is real. That stuff is based on mathematics, which is a whole lot more certain than anything you have your retirement funds in, I can assure you. Or grasp a tiny fragment of "Origin of the Species" or even the great library of popularizers of this monumental work and then let's discuss the situation of Man on Earth.

This is why I didn't want to do a reading list at the top. I am getting more and more smug by the phrase. It is only that, and here's the payoff: talking heads and op-eds tell me why people think they are right, and none of them cite any authorities which could remotely be related to the "REAL WORLD". This blog was actually, physically, begun during a rare moment of personal civic engagement in which I decided that, instead of talking the talk, I would walk the walk. Things did change, enough so that I moved onto more cerebral concerns, perhaps, but that doesn't negate the experience, any more than research into original sources of enlightenment means I'm a book-learnin' snob. If Jim's right, about a "Fear of Dreaming", then sure, you can accuse me of living in a dream world...only if you'll admit you're living in a delusion.

Now, if that seems like an extraordinary request, remember: we are merely coming to terms.