A Kindle Review

As both readers know, I have recently made the dive into the world of e-books. For one thing, I have bought a Kindle, so I have been reading a lot more, and a lot more widely than I have since college.

I will say right away that I love it. There are many reasons for this, most of which have been written about so much that it sounds like an ad for the Kindle, and doesn't really bear repeating.

However, I will say that one thing I like best about the device is the fact that I can browse the bookstore at my convenience and download samples to my Kindle for later. It's like going to the bookstore, picking up all the books that look interesting and taking them home to read the first chapter or so before sending them back.

There are some drawbacks to this device as well.

One thing I don't like about e-books in general is their homogeneity. All books look the same. Now if you are really concerned with the content, it might not seem to matter, right?

In fact, one of the main ways that I keep track of what I've read turns out to be by remembering which book I read it in. And remembering a book is more than simply remembering its contents.

In many ways, the physical cues that are associated with a book help my brain keep the information that I gain from it distinct from information I've gotten from other books. This process sounds almost medieval, but in fact, it's the way that my brain has been programmed. Remembering the book itself is sort of like a shorthand, an easy way to mark content mentally so that it's easier to retrieve and make use of later. A lot of times, I have 'forgotten' the contents of a book, only to 'recall' them later when I pick up the book and turn it over in my hands for a minute.

There is no such luxury with the Kindle. Oh, you can go back and find that book, but 'handling' it won't evoke any thoughts, since they all now 'look and feel' the same.

This isn't a huge problem, but it does affect my thinking. For example, now I am often faced with trying to remember just where I read something, and all I can recall is the e-ink. Since I love to read on various subjects--like politics, history or economics--all at the same time, I have trouble remembering just which point was made by which author and in which context. In fact, the e-ink removes so much of the context that my thoughts seem the only things stitching this content together.

It is true and well known that the physicality of books provides a great deal of pleasure for readers. What is also true but less well known is how the physicality of books helps us store and sort the information contained therein.

A Note for Readers

I want to thank both Readers today, for coming back to this journal and for taking the time to read my thoughts and observations. Thanks are in order, also, for your occasional comments and encouragement.

Many others keep journals and quite sensibly keep them private. Often I think I'd be better off doing the same. After all, I am keenly aware that not everything I write here is worth reading.

But unlike you, Dear Reader, I have no choice but to return here, day after day. I have to write everything that you see here, but fortunately you are not obligated to read it all.

To use an analogy that resonates with another side of my character, my hope it is that it's less like a plated dinner and more like a buffet. Just eat what looks good and leave the rest.

Thanks for eat...erm, reading!

The Riot of Life

It's not much of a meadow, really.

That is, when compared with the 'real' meadows that inspired Thoreau or Emerson or Whitman, this little patch of Texas grass and where I sit to write is quite modest, to say the least. There is no Walden Pond here.

In fact, where I sit is really nothing more than a rainwater collection pond. The city built it back when this neighborhood was developed some thirty years ago. It was designed to prevent Williamson Creek, which runs the length of the greenbelt that defines one edge of this neighborhood, from flooding.

There are many such 'ponds' in and around Austin. Ninety nine percent of the time, they are empty. Many are elaborately built concrete boxes and channels designed to funnel water off of impervious cover like parking lots. But this one is made for flood control in a neighborhood so it's just a simple ditch, really. It's about the size of a football field, with inner sloping sides about twelve feet deep.

These ponds are here in large part because as a community, Austin has been more conscious of the relationship between people and the land we live on. Here in Central Texas, we live right on top of the Edwards Aquifer, from which we derive a great deal of our water, even if we don't realize it.

It is easy to think of the water above ground, in lakes and rivers and even little 'sometimes' streams like Williamson Creek, but in fact most of the water used for agricultural irrigation, and a lot of what we drink here in Central Texas, is out of sight. It gets pumped out of the Edwards Aquifer.

These 'ponds' then, are actually collection places for rainwater. When we get a heavy rain, water collects in these boxes, channels and ditches. It builds up briefly before being filtered through the limestone below. Eventually, most of the water is passed directly into the Aquifer instead of channeling it into the waste-water collection system and from there into Town Lake.

But from where I sit, this empty 'pond' is anything but simple. This place is a literal riot of life.

The first thing I notice are the flowers. There are at least a dozen varieties of wildflowers and this is at the beginning of Summer. A month ago, during our 'Spring' there must have been fifty varieties of flowers in bloom out here. It was a record year for the bluebonnets, and they were just the first to show their heads.

The insect life is even more overwhelming. In spite of recent evidence that there are likely fewer insects in the world that we once thought, there are still plenty of them to go around.

Today is the day of the butterfly. A hundred thousand or more of the tiniest yellow butterfly imaginable pump the jagged surfaces of the flowers and grass with crazy uninhibited motion. Not one seems to be inclined to alight on a flower in the morning sunshine. They swoop and dive in the morning air as if to dry off the dew from their wings before breakfast.

These butterflies are merely the most visible of the insects. Besides the tiny yellow butterflies, there are white, brown and golden ones as well. I know that even more exotic and elaborate creatures are here as well.

As soon as I sit down, I a single miniature blue dragonfly hovers in the weeds not a foot from Loki's nose. Flies and bees and beetles are also hard to miss. The ants are here too, a zillion of them. And, don't get me started on the mosquitos, as they have already started in on me. That's just those that I can see. As a boy, I know from experience that many, many more bugs are also hard at work out there, tending to their tiny territories like indefatigable itinerant farmers.

Then there are the birds. Mostly I can just hear them, hiding in the branches of the trees surrounding the meadow, calling to one another and plotting their day's assault on the insects below. The littlest birds are already at work, darting above and through the grass jungle, snaring breakfast out of the air from the giant writhing mass that are the butterflies.

There are mammals here too, but for the moment, Loki and I are the only two that are actually visible. Loki keeps an eye out for the others, but this morning there are no squirrels, possums or even other dogs to entertain him. I have seen plenty of raccoons and even deer out here, but at this moment, they have already had the good sense to retreat to the darkest parts of the brush. The sun is rising rapidly in the sky.

There are numerous small copses of oak and mesquite that surround this meadow, but mostly what I see out here is grass. There must be a thousand varieties of grass in this tiny meadow alone. It seems boring at first glance. It is, after all, just grass. But this grass sustains all this other life, including me and Loki.

He is most anxious for me to quit writing and start walking again, but he will only have to wait a few more minutes. At eight am, it's is already hot.

As we walk, my eyes are drawn down to the flowers. It is hard to distinguish the 'wildflowers' from the grasses because so many of the grasses also have wonderful wildflowers. These flowers are either so tiny or so briefly present that we notice them only when they are in vast numbers. This morning, the flowering grasses are certainly here in number. They create a not-so-subtle background wash for those big and bright sex advertisements that are the more noticeable and similarly promiscuous wildflowers.

The butterflies are almost indistinguishable from the flowers and grass where they live and procreate. They are like flying flowers. Their shapes and colors are identical and in some ways interchangeable; they are sex on the wing.

It's all about sex and reproduction. It's hard not to notice just how intense and relentless life is, even in this place.

This is comforting to know, in such a real sense, for in the back of my mind is the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I will not poison this essay with many of my thoughts and feelings about that incident. That, as the saying goes, "is another story".

That said, however, as dismayed, angered and hurt as I am about the oil pouring into the Gulf for the past six weeks; as sick as I am to consider how much damage will be done, how much life--again, including us--that will perish as a result of this act of cowardly act of hubris; in spite of all this, I still have some hope.

Seeing this meadow--just simply being here now, to see how even this artificially sculpted and 're-purposed' landscape has been claimed and dominated by the riot of life gives me cause, for the moment, to be hopeful.

Why? Because life, that beautiful riot, is relentless.

I don't think life ever relinquishes even the tiniest morsel of the planet. This relentless drive to conquer may well be what saves even hypocrites like us from the ever bigger and even more lethal environmental disasters sure to come.

If I have another hope, it is that the foolish and willfully destructive corporate institutions of Man that bring about these disasters are not nearly so resilient as the hundred of millions of lives that they threaten.

The Gulf of Mexico will eventually recover. Let's hope that BP does not.

Deny, deny, deny

We are all hypocrites.

And no, I don't just mean those of us that claim to be pissed off about the BP Gulf oil spill while idling their SUV's in line at Starbucks. I mean all of us, and that includes me.

The simple fact is that no matter no hard we try, there is just no way that we can ever avoid hypocrisy. It could be described as a fundamental law of human nature.

Everyone is hypocritical. And not just some of the time. We are all hypocritical all of the time.

How could it be otherwise? No one ever does, no one ever can do exactly what they say they will.

Why? Because doing exactly what we say one will do is impossible. Something, sometime, somewhere always interferes with our intentions. The result is always different than the intent.

I said always, and I mean it.

What's more, we all know this to be true from daily experience and yet still we deny it daily. We all know that in every endeavor we've ever undertaken, no matter how carefully we planned, the end result was always different than the expected outcome. We always fail.

Sometimes this failure--this discrepancy between what should have been and what is--is simply too small to notice. Furthermore, it wouldn't matter if we noticed the difference or not. That's because even if it is just a matter of a fraction of a degree or a millionth of a nanosecond or a trillionth of a centimeter, all results, all end products are always different from the expectation that brought them into being.

We proceed through life as if avoiding hypocrisy was our most fervent intention. We expect to do what we say, and we expect others to live up to the ideals we think we hold dear. To be free from all hypocrisy is one of our most basic moral intentions, yet in this intention we fail, and not just often but always. In complete denial, we try again and again, daily, even hourly, as if our memory was continually being wiped, as if our most recent failure was recalled as a complete success. Deny, deny deny.

That's not so surprising, really. Denial is what we humans do.

We change our history, we change our art and we change our literature and our monuments, all to suit our denials of hypocrisy. Historians lie about their subjects--sacred or profane; artists lie about their intentions--lofty or debased; and everyone lies about sex--good and bad.

People lie without knowing or intending to. We mangle eyewitness accounts. We mis-remember our childhoods, forget people's names and make mental mistakes all the time.

Sometimes these mistakes are fatal. Sometimes the patient dies. Sometimes the plane crashes. But these kinds of things happen only once in a billion-billion times.

Or do they?

Certainly it is fair to say that the fatal mistakes are rare enough, but absent self-awareness, most of us are unlikely to emerge from the fog of denial about the hypocrisy that is inevitably present in even our most mundane actions. The problem with this arises when we punish ourselves for even--or especially--these continued transgressions. We think of ourselves as failures, weak-willed or incapable of adequate planning.

In the face of failure--both great and small--if we have any moral capacity, we tell ourselves--and others--that we will do better next time. However, even though we know that to be true, unless we change the way we think about hypocrisy, we are simply setting ourselves up for failure once again.

It's a vicious cycle, obviously--this process of denial and punishment--even if it's not always or immediately fatal. At best, wrapping ourselves in lies means that we are constantly engaging in mental self-flagellation. At worst, constant denial of our hypocritical nature is a slow form of moral self-destruction--a death by a thousand tiny cuts.

Now, self-flagellation wouldn't be so bad if the pain led us to an awareness that hypocrisy is not not so deserving of punishment as we might think. Sadly, self-destruction, on the other hand, is what actually happens to most of us.

So, what's the point?

Are we simply doomed to an endless vicious cycle? Well, perhaps. Many people are. But it needn't be that way. It's a matter of attitude and perception. If we could ever manage to convince ourselves that it's ok to be a hypocrite (most of the time, anyway), we might not be so hard on ourselves. Those cuts will heal.

On Hypocrisy

We are all

hypocrites
schizophrenics
hoarders
lovers
warriors
eaters
wearers
hunters
gatherers
born
dying

our own storytellers.

Straining Credulity

If a tree falls...

I know, it is one of those elementary mind benders, perhaps the very first paradox that I can recall wrestling with long before I had any idea that it was a philosophical pursuit. Like the notions of molecular motion and space that is really time (and matter too) the question of persistence was first posed to me by my brother Stephen, who was home from college and more than happy to blow my little but open and eager mind with these simple yet delightfully difficult philosophical concepts.

By persistence, I am referring to the notion that things, matter and the arrangements thereof, persist, or continue to exist, even when there is no human consciousness to perceive them. Two books that I am reading deal with this question in quite different ways. As a result, I am finally to a point where, if I am to have any hope of assembling my own thoughts and musings into a world view, I have to make some hard choices.

I finally have to decide if that damn tree makes a sound or not.

The first of these books is Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy where, although he acknowledges the fact that philosophical inquiry must question human perception as well as physical phenomena, he also argues for persistence and the fact that

Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world and show the strangeness and wonder lying below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

Of course, I'll never know for sure, such is the nature of the question, but at 53, after lo these many years of contemplating those 'commonest things' I am finally ready to stand.

It makes a sound. Matter persists.

As much as I would like to believe in the anthropic principle--that is, the idea that human consciousness is in fact the defining characteristic of matter--I cannot agree with the central assumption of this principle which holds that that without human perception no thing exists.

It is not as logical as Robert Lanza and Bob Berman would like make it sound in their recent best-selling defense of the anthropic principle, Biocentrism.

They write of a "solar system and universe so exact that it strains credulity to propose that they are random--even if that is exactly what standard contemporary physics baldly suggests."

As neat and efficient as a 'biocentric' answer might be, what really strains credulity is this idea--supposedly grounded in 'common sense'--that life is no coincidence or worse, that the Universe is the 'true' or 'real' purpose of human consciousness.

In fact, common sense actually tells us that it can't be that easy. Even if the 'standard contemporary physics' does not have all the answers (that still-elusive 'Theory of Everything'), to me, the more challenging and interesting questions arise from that very sense of uncertainty.

Don't take my word for it. Many actual physicists, according to Anil Ananthaswamy in The Edge of Physics, hold simply that 'biocentricism' is nothing more than a 'cop-out' which conveniently avoids having to explain "all things from first principles."

I think that 'biocentrism' is the very opposite of a logical explanation. Even by another name, this notion sounds suspiciously like a philosophy that would replace genetics with eugenics.

Common sense, when it comes to physics or philosophy, is often just a lazy way out of ignorance.

We have only to recall that at one time, most people believed that the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth. Many millions or billions of people--perhaps even a majority of those alive today--believe in a sentient and often personal god (or gods) who knows them and cares for them as individuals. Many people believe in 'creationism' and deny global warming, for the same reason.

Indeed, it takes far less work to explain things as they seem to be in order to avoid actually 'straining credulity'. And yet, if credulity were the only measure, and say, evolution is still up for debate, why aren't 'flat-earthism' or 'geocentrism' still widely held beliefs? Or, are they, Mr. Beck?

For me, the question of persistence not up for debate. Say, did you hear that tree fall?

Yellow Curbs and Green Lawns

They are painting the curbs here on campus this week. Commencement time has come again.

There are two moments on the academic calendar every year that form the two defining peaks of most college graduates' academic careers: Orientation and Commencement.

At these two moments the emotions are the purest, the least encumbered by reality and fate. At these two moments, all bets are off, the world is open and the possibilities are endless.

Leaving aside the experience of Orientation not least because not every student goes through it, it will suffice to say that there is still a moment in every student's career when, newly admitted to the Institution, they are 'fresh'. They as yet have no marks, either for or against them. At this unique moment new students feel--if only for that brief moment--that the possibilities before them are, if not limitless, varied enough to inspire an unashamed excitement and foster an emerging ambition.

This inspiration and ambition, if a bit artificial, are good things, too, or there would be no chance of an average student surviving the journey on which he or she is embarking. The deep trough that is the educational experience is considerable, and rising to the peak on the other side is no small accomplishment.

Commencement, the springtime celebration of that collective accomplishment here at the University, has, as it always does, come round again. And I am, as much ever, energized by it.

Why the good mood? Well, for a few short days in May, the campus has a wonderfully festive air about it. I welcome it because it brings both an emotional change of pace and a physical renewal of our environment.

For example, every year--no matter what the fiscal situation of the University might be (and it is forever dire)-- in addition to the freshly-painted curbs, we always see the South Lawn freshly re-sodded in early May. It appears as if overnight, though I know it always takes a couple of weeks, like the assembly of the metal risers and the massive stage that also 'magically' appear on the South Mall at the same time.

The bright green new South Lawn is surrounded by yellow warning tape until the evening of Commencement. This year there is a new set of even brighter orange stanchions with shiny black plastic chains preserving the virgin grass for the parade of graduates to come next week.

Then, on the evening of Commencement, that horde will march the South Lawn into near submission as they make their collective way up to the South Mall for fireworks and blessings from the President.

By this time, all those in attendance should have already received their 'fake' diplomas on a stage in their College with their Dean, so the march up the South Lawn for the final benediction is simply symbolic. It is an important symbol nonetheless.

It's a great day for students and staff alike. The graduates get their degrees and a special moment of empowerment. We get all that great energy, plus freshly painted curbs and a slightly worn but green South Lawn for the summer. Hook 'Em!

Dog and Me

There is an end to time.

Here in this meadow at dusk
with the dog
we sit apart
together in time
with time
to walk back
for dinner.

In the meadow I think:
Is the table there?

At table I think:
Is there a meadow?

We'll go and check
tomorrow
the dog and me.

If we find it
we'll sit apart
together in time
with time
to walk back
for dinner.

The Bibliotheque Humaine

Books are dead! Long live books!

Though I am, as usual, late to the party, I have begun to explore the world of e-books. The definition of an 'e-book' is still a bit vague these days, but that's what makes the subject interesting to me.

That and the fact that there are gadgets in involved.

We live in what is arguably the most interesting time to be a writer since Gutenberg, and quite possibly since writing itself was invented. And it's not just because gadgets are involved.

Technology--specifically, the internet, or cloud--has fundamentally altered the way in which writing is being produced and consumed. In the same way that the printing press marked the change from a manuscript to a codex culture, the creation of the cloud marks the change from a codex to a digital culture.

And, thanks to my Ipad, I am right in the center of it.

Well ok, I don't actually have an Ipad. Furthermore, even though the intense gadget lust is hard to deny, I really don't want an Ipad. Really. I actually want a Google Tablet.

Of course, no such object exists, yet, but it will. Come fall there will be a proliferation of e-reader devices of many sizes, shapes, thicknesses and, of course, costs, but right now, there are blissfully few. In fact, there are just four so far: the Kindle, the Nook, the Sony Reader and the Ipad. Of these, the Ipad isn't really an 'e-reader' because it relies on transmitted rather than reflected light.

That is, three 'e-readers' listed above (there are more being introduced every day, it seems) are very much like a book in that you really can't use them without a light source. These readers use what is being called 'e-ink' to display the letters on a neutral white background. In many ways, e-ink is as close to ink on a paper page as you can get from an electric display. Although the 'page' is an electronic screen, the surface is non-glare, so the problem of reflection is greatly reduced and thus e-readers are considered to be easier and less fatiguing to use for long periods of time.

Obviously, electronic screens, whether using e-ink or non-glare glass will never have the same reflective qualities as paper, but it's far easier to read when you are not dealing with the polished glass and bright light that characterizes all the Istuff...Iphones, Ipods, the Ipad.

Now, before you think that having to have a light source to use an e-reader is an inconvenience, consider for a moment if that's ever occurred to you before with an actual book. Did you ever say to yourself, 'Gee, this book is useless because I can't read it in the dark?'

Eventually however, the difference between reflected versus transmitted light will prove to be a trivial difference. It's a preference really, as the new age of digital publishing emerges from the cloud.

Light is the common denominator. If you really think about it, this will be the first time in human history that so much light has been used to transmit so many words from eye to eye, and thence from mind to mind. Great though they have been--and will continue to be, for this essay is no book obituary--books have ever been prisoners of their own covers, bindings and the shelves upon which they sit.

I can't help but recall how books have changed, even in my lifetime.

Both Readers of this journal know that I was raised in a bookstore, the child of serious book people. But few will know that while studying at the American College in Paris in the mid 1970's, I was once permitted what my parents would have considered to be the 'ultimate' library experience: the Bibliotheque Nationale (BN). As a naive youth, I failed to understand the luxury I was afforded at the time, going to the BN armed with letters from my Professor and a Dean of the College to do some research for a paper.

Accustomed as I was to the American library system, nothing could have seemed more stringent and less conducive to doing research than trying to get a book from the BN. In fact, I couldn't really 'get' a book from the BN back then, and I'm sure it's no different today.

I came to the Library at my appointed time, with a list of the three books that I hoped to look at. I could pick just three books, and they had to be chosen in advance. There was no going through the card catalog--that simply wasn't open to the 'public'. Yes indeed, even though I had a legitimate pass to get my books, I was still considered to be a member of the 'public' and was therefore not entitled to do more than examine three books of my choice.

I entered the building with considerable anxiety, not the least of which was due to my still-poor French. I overcame this fright and made my way to the imposingly high counter at the back of a great hall. After waiting my turn (always, in France, there is a wait), I presented my hand-written list to the clerk.

He looked over my letter and me with some amusement and no small disdain, it seemed to me. I was anything but a legitimate scholar, but my papers seemed to be in order. My list was taken and I was instructed to sit on a bench nearby and wait. After a half hour or so, the clerk returned with two of my three choices. The third was simply not available, and no explanation was due me in any case. I took my two volumes to a carrel in the great hall and pretended to read them.

Now, today, I have no memory of what the books were, though I do know I was writing a paper on Romanesque sculpture in southern France. What I recall most was the marked difference between my experience at the old BN, and going to the newly opened public library in the Centre George Pompidou. Many Parisians openly hated the 'Beaubourg' (as it came to be called derisively) because it looks like an industrial plant rather than a cultural center, but many more secretly hated it for the change in culture that it represented.

Public libraries, as we know them in America, at least, do exist in France, but were most uncommon when I was there. A public library such as that which opened in the Beaubourg in 1976 was a relatively new and even 'radical' concept for the French at the time.

And, although there was some real fear among the aging intellectual elite of 'La France' that homeless bums would take up residence in the library or worse, that the 'unwashed' public simply couldn't be trusted not to carve up and mutilate the books once permitted to handle them freely, in fact neither of these--nor any of the other--dire consequences resulted from this uncharacteristic French loosening of control.

As an American college student, used to 'free' and 'public' libraries, I was amused at what seemed to be a non-event. After all, I reasoned, we've had them for years, thanks to Dale Carenegie, right?

Perhaps, but now, years later, I see that, although our libraries are indeed public, even with all their open and free catalogs, most of the knowledge, most of the information, most of the power in those books is still locked up almost as securely as the dusty tomes in the back rooms of the Bibliotheque Nationale.

By creating the cloud and populating it with words, we will have finally wedged open the great door to La Bibliotheque Humaine. We are at last allowing light-- reflected or transmitted--to fall upon the words we all own. Questions of commerce and copyright will be forever changed of course. But, whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, these words, all of them, are our human legacy and after many centuries they are inexorably emerging into the light.

The power of words is not and shall not henceforth be restrained by mere ink and paper.

Finding My Haircut

Every man eventually finds his haircut.

Young men struggle with their hair. At first they celebrate it by growing it out. And why not? Hair is a symbol of youth itself. Thin and light or heavy and wiry, an excess of hair is a signature trait of young men in their teens and early twenties. This trait, this marker in time, is actually a process, a passage into adulthood.

Sadly, unlike women, no matter the surfeit of hair, men have very few choices when it comes to a hairstyle. My father, for example, who had less on the top of his head than growing out of his ears, knew this from long experience with little hair. He always enjoyed a good laugh at the seventies 'hair stylists' who offered to 'style' his hair for a few dollars more. Although he had the sense to know that styling a classic comb-over was ridiculous, somehow the idea of having a comb-over in the first place didn't seem to cross that same line.

I'm not saying that every man grows into the right haircut. Just 'his' haircut.

Eventually, it has to happen. The experimenting comes to an end. The hair 'products' and styling gels get washed out. Dying and close cropping get cropped, as do the ponytails and rattails. The mutton chops get chopped. Of course, not every man does this. Not every man gives this stuff up. But most do.

Most men give up with styling and settle on one haircut out of sheer laziness. It's the same with clothes, really. Most men would prefer to do as little 'prep' work every day as possible. This is not because there is any deficit of vanity in front of male bathroom mirrors, by the way. Most men just don't have the sustained energy to keep up with their hair. So, in time--usually mid to late twenties--they settle on the path of least resistance. Eventually, they pick a haircut and learn to live with it.

It's not as bad as it sounds, really. It's not giving in so much as it it seeing which way the universe is leaning and just going that way. In my case the choice, like my father's, was made simple by the absence of hair.

Now, unlike my father, a comb-over was definitely not among my options. Certainly, his comb-over (and subsequently, in my first year away from home, the similar affectation of a certain freshman history professor who had the habit of leaning over while he read the day's lecture) made me resolve never, ever to allow that to happen to my head.

Thus, the calculus is simple when I sit down in the barber, erm, hair stylist's chair these days. She will ask me how I want it cut. And I say, "Give me the old guy cut." This is a variant on the directive my father used to give the barber (yes indeed) as I clambered into the great big leather and chrome chair in my youth.

"Give him the little boy's cut" he would say, and out came the clippers. It took all of thirty seconds, if you didn't count the little shave they gave me around the neck and the cut that ensued when the razor hit the mole at the hairline. Nowadays, it takes about the same amount of time, but the stylists use scissors instead of electric clippers. They still hit that mole.

In some ways, the process of finding my haircut--even if it was motivated by a brutal slide down Occam's razor--was the same as finding my voice as a writer.

Both required much experimentation to make sure I have tried everything reasonable--and then some. Both required that I made some mistakes, but none of them were lethal. Both required that I would relent--eventually--to the force of our human nature and accept what it is because it could not be otherwise.

Neither process has required that I give up my individuality nor did either losing my hair or finding my voice require that I conform, completely, to any stereotype. I am a bald guy, but not just any bald guy. I am a writer, but not just any writer. Both my haircut (or absence thereof) and my voice have been shaped by a complex combination of my genes and my experiences.

In my case, it happened that I didn't find my voice until recently. The odd combination of my obsessive compulsive personality and the circumstance of having grown up in a traditional book culture with an unconventional autodidact for a Mother has for many years restrained my voice. But the annealing fire of grief has at last burned away the resistance and cleared away the background noise.

It took much longer than finding my haircut, but at last, I think I can finally hear my voice through the din.

What We All Know

With every passing second, people around the globe--like an army of mindless brooms directed by an invisible 21st Century Sorcerer's Apprentice--are using the new tools of technology to add, bit-by-byte, billions and billions of buckets of information to the ever-growing pile of human knowledge.

How big can the pile get? Is there a limit to this knowledge, or is it infinite?

Before we jump to the obvious conclusion--that no matter how large, the number is still finite--I think it's worth thinking about our old friend Zeno and the space-time paradox that we live as 'everyday reality.'

In other words, is it enough to know that information must be finite to conclude that knowledge has a limit as well?

This may seem like a question of semantics, but it's more than a neat juxtaposition of terms. Though they overlap to the point where they seem congruent to the casual eye, information and knowledge are not necessarily the same thing, and the difference is not trivial.

Making the distinction is important, I think, because while the gathering of information has expanded at at exponential pace throughout human history, the synthetic process of creating human knowledge--which is also expanding with mind-bending rapidity--is not accelerating at anywhere near the same rate.

Large though it may be, the amount of information is necessarily finite. The expansion of human knowledge, on the other hand, like Zeno's arrow, will never find a boundary.

Consider for a moment only a very narrow set of knowledge. What do we all know? We define knowledge so broadly that sometimes we give it a credibility that is at the very least unnecessary and at worst, most likely disproportionate to it's intrinsic importance.

So, while it's a given that something needs be "known" by only one person in history to be considered knowledge, it should also stand to reason that consequentially, most knowledge is thus simultaneously local. Most knowledge is consistently lost to all but a handful of humans over time and through space.

But what of things that are known universally, by all humans, in all places and at all times?

First of all, are there such things? Are there certain things that "we all know"? Indeed, are there even certain things that we all learn?

Well, we all know--even infants--that we must eat to live. We are born hungry, and every day, every human, no matter how well fed--experiences hunger and thirst. We all know--even infants and the insane--that to fall from a great height is to risk death, or that to touch fire is to risk getting burned.

The list may be a long one, but there are indeed things that "we all know".

There are nuances, of course--like the fact that we all know that being hungry is not the same as starving to death, or that falling into hay--even from a large distance--is consequentially different than falling a short distance onto rock. Oh, and we all "know" from experience--not necessarily from being told--that the heat from a stove is not so obviously dangerous as fire itself.

These are minor and relatively inconsequential distinctions however. These are imaginary artifices, divisions that we make between the basic bits of information and the basic webs of knowledge that those bits form inside our brains.

And, are those distinctions really important? Are webs of knowledge, like the bits of information that form them, finite or infinite? If we were to make a list, say, of "the things everybody knows" would the list ever even have a final item?

I "know" that the mathematicians have an answer for this question. I am not inclined to agree with them, if only because I also "know" that--despite our calculations--the arrow never really reaches the target. It just looks that way.

Thing Abuse

I am a chronic abuser of things.

I can say this now without shame or fear of retribution because I know that the objects of my abuse, undeserving of it though they may have been, have no feelings, no morals and no desire for revenge. I also know that even though my behavior was seldom justified, it was equally seldom intentionally abusive in the strictest sense.

Mostly, it was accidental.

I have been breaking and/or losing things since I can first remember. Some of my earliest memories deal with the frustration and anger resulting from losing or breaking something. Usually that something was not mine. In fact, it's only been relatively recently, when my 'affluence' has permitted me to buy things of my own to lose and/or break.

I say "and/or" because usually, I can mange to do both. It's always just a matter of time for one or the other. Of course, it is easier to break something before I lose it, but I have been known to pull it off the other way round as well. Like I said, I'm chronic.

And, it started even before I knew I had a problem. That's because, when I was younger, it was mostly things that I was given--what else does one have before the age of ten?--that I managed to break and/or lose. So, for a long time, I didn't know that the heartbreak of loss of a thing wasn't real.

As a result, my heartaches started early. One of the first things I can remember losing was one of my Father's cufflinks when I was about eight. On Friday night as I got dressed for services, Bill lent me the set of sterling silver links with a "D" engraved on them. I managed to lose one of them before sunset. Perfect.

I can remember losing a garnet ring my parents bought me at the market in Mexico City when I was eleven. My parents were visiting some friends and I'd been forced out 'to play' in the back yard while the grownups talked in the house. I lost the ring about ten minutes after we arrived. Then, I spent the rest of the afternoon frantically crawling on my hands and knees through what seemed like acres of St. Augustine grass picking vainly at the brown roots in search of a never-to-be-seen-again flash of red. I suffered in silence on the trip home, ashamed to admit that I had lost my treasure or that I was covered, head-to-toe, in chigger bites.

My father's things were, unfortunately, a constant target of my abuse. I broke Bill's favorite light meter on a camping trip when I was thirteen. I broke at least two of his cameras sometime after that. To his credit, he continued to allow me to touch his cameras right through my college years, with the expected disastrous results. I wrote about breaking his camera in Paris in a post in this journal called (go figure)The Camera.

It wasn't just Bill's precious things that I managed to break. Other family members have been targeted as well. No one, in fact, in my family is exempt, nor have they ever been. When I traveled to stay with my brother Stephen in Kansas City in 1965, I broke the first electric potters wheel in his studio and my ankle in the bargain.

Over the years, I've broken bikes, cars, cameras, watches, saws, coffee pots, record players, records, CD's, DVD players, computers, model airplanes, plates, glasses, printers and toasters. That's a very short and very incomplete list.

Honestly, I've broken or lost almost anything and everything I've ever had. As noted, I've broken a lot of things that weren't even mine. In fact, if I've broken something of yours, dear Reader, if you were unaware of my condition, now you know why.

Indeed, now I've come to the quite reasonable conclusion that, constrained only by age and some hard-earned caution, I'm actually on pace to bat very near a thousand. That is, without resorting to metaphor, I can say frankly that given enough time, I fully expect to break or lose everything I've ever owned or will own.

The only circumstance that may save some of these things will be my untimely end.

There's a simple truth here that I've learned. No matter how careful, wealthy or wise you are, every thing you own will eventually get lost, broken or be taken from you.

Things, I have learned, carry this intrinsic and often unseen danger. Things, I have learned, are here with us but for one reason: To break the hearts of those who would willfully seek and attach themselves to them.

In this sense, it is perhaps my clumsiness and abusive relationships with things that have so far preserved me into my middle years. On looking back, I really thought that loved those things. Now I see myself as having been a false lover.

Apparently, I never loved things enough to prevent me from breaking and/or losing them.

It's not as though I haven't tried to love my things. Though I am not without my share of heartache--as my abridged list of abused things will readily testify--I sense that I have in fact actually been preserved by callousness toward the well-being of things through my innocent youth.

I admit, when I was seventeen, I didn't care if rolling the electric windows in Bill's Mercedes up and down repeatedly would break them. It did. Now that I am fifty-three, I don't much care if my repeated use of the windows in my truck will do the same. It will.

The difference is that now I find myself in a place where I not only admit to being uncaring about the life of things, but pronounce that attitude with some pride. It is precisely this attitude which will allow me to escape from what could have, would have been, an inevitable sense of guilt brought on by a lifetime of lost and broken things.

The reason for this change is simple. I've lost things I that I thought I loved and I've lost people whom I know I have loved. No matter what, the things just don't matter.

What do I think I can do?

I'll be honest, I was was grateful to find Mr. N. asleep in his room when I arrived at the nursing home last week.

I saw the Hospice nurse at the door on my way into the facility. Although she cheerfully told me that Mr. N. would be happy to see me if I woke him up, I was not inclined to do so. This not just because I didn't want to disturb him, but more because when he is awake, I am not quite sure what to say to him.

Since I started seeing him several months ago, Mr. N. has never been what I would call coherent. For example, when I first met him, he was visiting with his daughters in his room on a Sunday morning. Having never met me, the daughters greeted me with some understandable circumspection, but Mr. N. had no such reservations.

He smiled broadly and took my offered hand. "Well," he said, "It's sure been a while since I've seen you!"

Now, to this assertion I could only agree. "Indeed!" I said, "It's a pleasure to see you!"

The daughters looked at me quizzically. I quickly assured them that this was in fact our first meeting. I introduced myself, of course, and soon left them with a promise to return to visit Mr. N. on a weekly basis.

Each visit has been marked by a visible bit of decline in Mr. N. Though not unexpected, it does limit the interaction we've had. Try though I might have to talk about the weather, or to ask about his family, he's never really answered any of my questions. And try though he might have to respond to my queries, nothing approaching a coherent conversation has emerged from our visits.

At least until last week.

Thinking--hoping--that I would find him in repose when I arrived, I brought my book. I soon sat relieved in the big chair in the corner, watching him snore while I pretended to read. But, not a moment after I sat down, I was startled by the sound of an old woman's voice. She was loudly calling for help.

"Someone please help me!"

I sat up. The voice was coming from across the hall.

"Please, someone help me."

I started to get up.

"I need to get off the train!" she said, in a very matter-of-fact tone. I stopped to listen some more. It was not so much what she said, but the volume of her voice and the anxiousness therein that caught my attention. She was calling out as though to someone whom she could see but who couldn't hear her. it was as if she were calling to someone through the window of a train.

"I need to get off the train." Her voice was insistent and impatient. She went on and on.

"I need to get off in Chicago. Do you know if this train goes to Chicago? I need to get on the train so I can get off the train. I need to know if this is the right train. Is this the train to Chicago? If so, I need to get off, in Chicago. If not, I need to get on the train to Chicago so I can get off in Chicago. So, I need to get on the train so I can get off the train. Please, someone help me. Help me get off the train."

All this she said without taking a breath it seemed. I sat on the very edge of my chair, book folded over my hand, eager to move and satisfy my curiosity, but at the same time, paralyzed by the tenor of her voice.

I began to wonder. Was there someone in the room with her? Or, was she just calling out to anyone who might hear? She was talking so loudly that it seemed unlikely anyone was with her, but I was becoming more and more curious. Why had no one come to calm her down? Would anyone ever come?

My curiosity overtook me. I got up and slowly crept out of Mr. N's room to have a look. There was no one in the hall and no one coming to check on her, so I angled over to the point where I could see into her room.

The old woman was lying quite alone in her bed, with eyes closed and arms folded across her chest in a corpse position. Her hands were balled into fists and she was still talking at the top of her lungs to no one at all.

But, no sooner than I crossed into her field of view, her eyes popped open and she turned to look at me.

"Who's there?"

Like a six-year old child caught with his hand in the cookie jar, I felt the hot flush of embarrassment and I fled back to the quiet safety of Mr. N's room. I jumped back into the chair and opened the book, though I had no illusions about being able to read.

"I need to get off the train. Please, someone, help me get on the train so I can get off the train in Chicago."

And so it went, for another twenty minutes. I sat on the edge of the chair, paralyzed byt the metaphor and watched the shadows cross the wall. I listed to Mr. N's soft snores under the constant railing from the lost traveler across the hall. I thought of Lynda, who employed the very same metaphor when she at last realized that she was dying. And, I thought of Mr. N., who couldn't ask to get off even if he wanted to. Or so I thought.

At 4:20, two young attendants came in to wake Mr. N for dinner and get him into his wheelchair. In less than twenty seconds, they woke him up, sat him up and transfered him to his chair. When I first saw this procedure several weeks ago, I thought it was rude to say the least. But this time it seemed more efficient than undignified.

After one of the attendants wiped his eyes and put on his glasses, I stepped up to say hello.

In spite of his condition, Mr. N. has never failed to greet me with a smile, and this time was no exception. Today, however, perhaps because he was just freshly awakened, he seemed to be a bit more present. His eyes focused on me as I took a seat on the bed next to him.

"We'll have to see what we can do," he said, quite clearly as he looked at me, "In terms of the company."

I had no idea what he meant by this at first, but it quickly occurred to me that he might be interviewing me for a job.

Now, up till this point, I had never considered what I would say if I could actually understand Mr. N. I took it for granted that we would never have a meaningful conversation of any sort.

Yet, in this brief moment, Mr. N. seemed so lucid that it would have been disrespectful to remind him that I was a Hospice volunteer, not a job applicant at the company for which he used to work. Why not play along?

So I did. I said simply, "Thanks, I appreciate the opportunity."

He said, smiling again, "Where do you live?"

"South Austin. Brodie and William Cannon. It's very convenient."

"Good," he said, studying me with soft pearlescent grey eyes.

"So, what do you think you can do?"

Suddenly the game became a serious one. What a question! And from such a source! What could I say that would make sense? To him or me? I found myself in a gravity well, spinning round with the force of falling. Down the rabbit hole. Suddenly I was the one who wanted off the train.

Fortunately, I was saved by the attendant, who returned to take Mr. N. to dinner.

"4:30! Time for your dinner Mr. N!"

She smiled at me but had no idea why I had that conflicted look on my face. I shook Mr. N's hand and wished him an enjoyable dinner. He looked at me blankly again, caught back up in the quotidian world as she rolled him away.

I was left wondering, as I am still. "What do I think I can do?"

My Letter to Mike Rowe

Dear Mike,

First off, I want to say that, like everyone who writes you (no doubt), I am a fan of your show.

Now, I can't say I've seen every show. I can't even say that I watch the prime time episode every week. But, somehow--maybe because the Discovery Channel runs it all week in the late-night slots--I end up watching at least two or three episodes a week.

Heck, sometimes we even watch two or three episodes at a time!

So, I've seen you at work. I saw you climb into that buoy and under that house with all the vermin, and the room with the mosquito larvae and the place where they dissolved flesh to get at the bones. Yes, I've seen you milk camels and reach into a cow's stomach. I saw you make that charcoal and that bird food.

When it comes to dirty jobs, you definitely done them all. Well, all but one.

You see, whenever you get to that part of the show when you turn to the camera and beg us, your loyal viewers to send in our ideas to keep you in work, I always came up empty handed, so to speak. That is, until the other day. That's when it hit me.

I have a dirty job for you, Mike!

Ironically, it's a job I've actually been doing for more than twenty years. It's a job I used to do, routinely. But it's gotten be too dirty, and too tough a job, even for me.

I like to think I'm a pretty tough guy. I've been a waiter and in the restaurant and catering business all my life, and I'm used to hard, dirty work. I've hauled heavy things, cleaned dirty things and done both to downright nasty things. leftover food, grease traps, broken dishwashers, clogged toilets and septic tanks.

In short, I know dirty and I know hard. And this job is a bit too much of both for me.

But, it's not what you're thinking. No. it's not at the restaurant. It's at home. The job?

Cleaning the kitchen after my wi...erm, Bride, Valery makes dinner.

Oh right, I can hear you saying. "Now that sounds like really a dirty job."

Well, ok, you're entitled to be smug about it. At least till you've done it.

Let me say right now that Valery is a wonderful cook. Better than that, she is an inspired and inspiring chef. She has made dinners that even the most discerning foodie in the world would absolutely rave about. As I said, I've been in the restaurant business all my life, and have eaten in many places and many countries. And I'll stand by Valery's cuisine any day. Many a diner at our table has affirmed this simple truth.

So, here's the offer. Come have dinner with us. We'll even feed Barsky (and the crew). That part, I am sure, you'll enjoy.

Then, you have to clean the kitchen. That part, believe it or not, is a helluva dirty job.

Oh, right. Proof. How about some photos, or, some videos?

Keep in mind that these are just examples. The best part--for you anyway--is that you only have to do it once. Pity my poor daughter Madelaine, who has to clean it up almost every night.

Did I mention that I don't do it anymore? Call me lazy. Call me a wimp. Just don't call me to clean the kitchen.

That's your job. Your next Dirty Job.

The Two Tables

There are two tables in our house.

Of course, if you were to go have a look, you'd swear there is just the one. It's right there in our kitchen 'nook'.  Right now, it looks like a single table.

Most often, it is the kitchen table. Like now, with all the stuff that is the day in the life of a typical family scattered across it.  It's covered with envelopes, newspapers and a laptop or two, looking for all the world like the kitchen table in many houses around the world.   But, in our house, like many houses, there are actually two tables right there.

The thing is, the two tables occupy the same space, but not the same time.

Many days, even when evening comes and it's time to set the table for dinner and all that stuff of the day is swept away, the table is still the kitchen table.  In our house, we routinely eat at the kitchen table.

Some days, however, the laying of the tablecloth and placement of the utensils and dishes anticipates a more formal event, one we call Dining with the Dubovs.  On these days, the object itself is transformed, from a kitchen table into a dining table.

If that sounds a bit like transubstantiation, it likely is.  In some ways, this 'transformation' requires the same slippery semantics and it definitely relies on a similar leap of faith.

The principle difference between taking communion and Dining with the Dubovs is that, instead of a measly bit of wafer and wine, at our table, you'll get some savory rosemary grilled lamb chops and a generous heap of fragrant spiced couscous to go with your full glass of malbec.

You'll also get some interesting conversation at our table.  In fact, as important as the food is, some say that the food isn't the most important thing at the table.  The table is.  The food, they say, is really just an excuse to get together around it.

Or is it? Does good food bring people to the table, or do the people at the table demand good food?

I think it's the former, since whose table it is that people will gather at depends on who is cooking.

In our house, fortunately, that is Valery. When our kitchen table is transformed, there is no doubt that it's Valery's culinary skill that brings the Diners to the Dubovs.

Time Travel

Time travel is possible.  I know this because I've just returned from a trip to the past.

For just few brief minutes the other evening, I found myself returned to my childhood. Though absent the literal proximity with the earth, and perhaps some of the acuity of vision that I enjoyed in adolescent days, in every other way it was indistinguishable from those long ago and seemingly lost forever moments.

I fell into this all-too-brief reverie while on a recent walk with Loki.  This phenomenon is actually become something of a common occurrence for me of late, and in no small way because of Loki.

Loki's ever-present 'present' state of mind is wonderfully contagious. It happens when we are just us two together on a walk in the greenbelt.  Off leash, Loki darts from one side of the path to the other, immediately as deep in smell as I have been in thought.

This is where the transformation takes place, for as I watch him--so utterly and unconsciously absorbed in the moment--I am somehow pulled--transported, literally--into that world of his where only small things happen, and they happen very close to the earth. Suddenly I am on my knees in the dirt, poking at an ant pile to see what they will do (I know) or examining a tiny yellow and white field flower to see how it is made (I still don't know).

That's what it is like to be a child (or a dog): always lost in the moment and always very close to the earth.

Children are, by nature, scientists from birth.  At first, they have no choice but to gather empirical data about the world in which they find themselves suddenly and without explanation.  Much of it has to do with proximity, for they are still physically close enough to the earth examine it closely.

And, talk though their parents will, the sounds the grownups make are just a small--even miniscule--part of what children must interpret of their own devices.  It's a literal flood of information that every child must gather, sort and make sense of from the first breath outside the womb.  So, no matter how much parents talk, children simply have lots figuring out to do on their own.

Of course, once children are capable of understanding and talking, the process of learning moves gradually away from direct observation.  This is inevitable but not necessarily a good thing, for the process of gathering and analyzing empirical information as a way of understanding the world does not end with childhood.

Or, at least, it shouldn't.  Alas, in fact, most of us give up our interest in 'basic' research shortly after puberty in favor of 'applied' research with some tangible goals, like sex and money.  Though our social interests seem to quickly supercede our empirical ones as we age, as living creatures we begin life knowing instinctively that basic knowledge is no luxury. It is about survival.  We all start off as basic researchers because our lives depend on it, literally.

We turn to applied research as soon as we are able, in most cases.  But not everyone trades in their their inner scientist at thirteen for girls (or boys, sometimes), fortunately.  Many generations of scientists have never stopped looking at the world around them as they did when they were children.

Though, as in most things, in science I am yet a dilettante, on occasion Loki and I travel back in time to the day when I took my research seriously.

Art on the Way: The Barton Barriers

Some folks are wondering what the heck this 'Art on the Way' stuff I've been talking so much about. Here's the story so far:

My brother Steve, who is about 13 years older than me, is a sculptor. He moved to Austin a few years ago to help me care for Lynda during her passing and he decided to stay. He opened up a sculpture studio, which he calls Atelier 3D, to make a living by teaching sculpting classes. He has done pretty well so far. He's managed to keep the operation going while working on his own body of work.

The Atelier 3-D website

Over the years, he has worked in almost every medium there is, from steel, wood and particularly ceramics. He made a whole series of figurative sculptures, which he called 'Vens' (short for Venus) while he was in California.

The 'Vens'

Then when he first got here, about three years ago, he started making what he called 'book shrines' which were essentially elaborate ceramic boxes or display cases for his favorite books.

One of the 'Book Shrines'

Currently, his work is with what he calls folded glass. He takes automotive glass--it has a layer of plastic sandwiched between two sheet of glass--and crushes it under the wheels of his truck. This causes the glass to crack into intricate patterns, but it doesn't fall apart because the plastic holds it together. Then, he folds the glass into abstract shapes and links the pieces together with polished aluminum bolts, buckles and ties.

Some of the folded glass work

Then, about a year or two ago, he came up with an idea he calls "Art on the Way". The idea behind this project is that there are many unused public spaces in and around town (Austin, but it could be anywhere). These are small bits of land that developments and streets and utilities have rendered useless for anything other than just taking up space. For example, when an intersection is enlarged, sometimes there will be a tiny triangle of land that is 'left over' when they finish with all the pavement, curbs, etc. So it just sits there. Sometimes there is a bit of grass or some scrubby trees on it, but a lot of times it's just a patch of dirt.

The Art on the Way website

Steve's idea is to use these discarded and unnoticed spaces as places to put art, specifically sculpture. Now, we do indeed have a good bit of public sculpture, but it's just the sort of thing you would expect, like a monumental sculpture of a local musician and another one of a giant abstract bat. The musician was Stevie Ray Vaughn, by the way, and he was indeed one of the greatest blues guitarists ever (he died in a helicopter crash a number of years ago), so his sculpture is very naturalistic. The bat came to Austin because we have one of the largest Mexican Freetail Bat colonies anywhere in the world living right under a central bridge here in town called the Congress Avenue Bridge.

The Stevie Ray Vaughn sculpture

The Bat sculpture

The Congress Avenue Bridge and the bats

All that is to say that sculpture in Austin is and has been so far a relative uninteresting affair. Steve's idea is to change all that. So, his first project was something completely different. He decided to make a monumental sculpture out of something we see so much of here in the US that we really don't 'see' it at all any more: the street. Specifically, he hit on the idea of using traffic barriers, something so ubiquitous that we almost never really notice them other than to avoid running into them. Now, there are a lot of varieties of traffic barriers, ranging from cones to barrels to Yodocks.

Yodocks?

These are a particular type of traffic barrier, made entirely of that nearly-indestructible plastic that they make the cones and barrels out of, but in a rectangular shape, and hollow so that it can be filled with water or sand for stability. The advantage to these is that they are cheap to make and easy to put in place. They are not too hard, so if someone runs into them, the damage to their vehicle is minimized. They are often linked in miles-long chains on the highway, dividing two lanes in construction zones. Again, we see them all the time. So much that we no longer really see them.

Pictures of Yodocks at work

Steve's idea was to put these Yodocks up off the road in a sort of whimsical arrangement that is reminiscent of Christo's many works. He envisioned a long strip of them, sprinkled, as if by a giant, along a bit of unused and unnoticed land on a street in South Austin called Barton Skyway.

Here is the location: Barton Skyway & South Lamar

He needed more than just a few of these Yodocks to pull this off, however, so he called the compnay to see if they would be interested in loaning him a few of the barriers for his art project. He suggested that it could be a great public relations opportunity for the compnay, and they agreed! In fact, they loaned him 37 of the barriers. Ordinarily, the company rents them for like $50 apiece per day, so this was a pretty generous contribution. Of course, they saw it as a publicity stunt and even had a reporter from the 'Construction Times' (or something like that) on site taking pictures and making notes for a trade mag story.

Speaking of contributions, Steve also planned to raise money for the project by applying for funding from the City of Austin. The City has a special fund set aside by ordinance to provide for art in public places. The money comes from the construction permits, and is intended to provide arts funding for new buildings in particular, but it is available to fund public art anywhere in the city. The two sculptures I mentioned above were also funded in part by the City.

There's a complicated application process and the projects have to be reviewed and approved by some kind of supervisory board, but Steve navigated the entire process and emerged with $4,300 grant. Of course, he had to turn around and pay the City about $700 of that for the necessary permits, but at least he got something.

He also raised money from other people, nearly $5000 in total. He went to the neighborhood association to get their approval and did. They even agreed to help with the installation, volunteering to help build it and provide the water that went to fill all those barriers. Steve went to the businesses around the site and got them involved as well. With all that support and a corps of willing volunteers, he set about making it a reality.

About a week ago, Steve, his girlfriend and collaborator Heather, and about forty or so volunteers, of which I was one, went to the site early in the morning and toiled all day to push, place, stack, strap and fill all 37 of the Yodocks, creating a monumental work of art:

Slide show of the installation process

Video of the installation process

As you might imagine, it was not universally well received. Many people who stopped to watch us work siad in no uncertain terms that they didn't like it and thought it was a waste of time. Well, fair enough, but at least it was our time that we were wasting.

And, it seemed like the discussion would stay in this area--that is, maybe it's a bit nutty but harmless all the same--until a local newspaper columnist picked up on it and wrote a 'review' that ran in the paper and appear online the following Monday.

John Kelso writes a kind of humor/local flavor column three times a week for the Austin American Statesman. For years he's written about 'good ol boy' sorts of things, like ugly trucks and old dogs. To be fair, he does often write about local art and happenings, especially if they are of the pseudo-weired variety.

Steve's piece, which bears the title "Barton Barriers" by the way, fit right squarely into Kelso's sweet spot, so to speak. Kelso made no bones of the fact that he didn't like it, which was a fair appraisal, since not everyone can be expected to get the joke, even humor columnists.

Kelso's 'review'

The problem that I had with his 'review' had to do with the fact that he made mention of the money Steve had gotten from the City as a reason for disliking the piece. Though he didn't actually do make the claim himself, Kelso left the door open for the 'wingnuts' to claim that this art was just another waste of taxpayer money. A boondoggle, they called it.

I couldn't let this go, so I wrote Kelso directly. And to my surprise, he wrote back! Not just once, but a couple of times. He was nice enough about it and, darn it, right about the money.

I took umbrage but I really needn't have. Kelso gently pointed out that the first rule of journalism is to mention the money, and that the wingnuts will come out no matter what you say or do. "It's what they live for" he observed sagely. Alas. Heavy sigh.

My correspondence with Kelso

Even though I know that the real first rule of journalism is to spell the names right, I have to agree with Kelso about our common goals, journalists and artists: more readers/viewers.

Not everyone was as observant of human nature as Kelso. Others played it straight, missing the joke and playing into our hand simultaneously, thankfully with no hint of the irony.

FOX News also 'covered' the story!

Really? A $4.3K boondoggle? When senators and representatives routinely waste hundreds of thousands and even millions or billions (that's M & B!) of taxpayer money, now that's a boondoggle! This was just a little joke.

Except that the wingnuts don't 'do' jokes. Everything is serious and everything is political. It started with the comments to Kelso's story, then moved to the blogs, then the TV and Dallas radio stations all jumped on the bandwagon, each with the same 'fraud busting' theme. Even if we happen to live a fairly liberal city, it is still Texas after all.

Silly stuff. But as it turns out a lot of people are actually taking notice of the work.

Any publicity is good publicity, right?

The Great and the Small

Last night as my head hit the pillow, I could the the far-off cry of a train whistle. The cliche, of course, is that the sound is a lonely one, but to me it was quite comforting. As I relished this small pleasure, I began to wonder where it was, this train and this sound that made me feel like this.

From how far away, I wondered, can I be comforted by a mere sound?

Mere is meant as an incendiary because we all know how deep sound cuts into our hearts and minds, past, present and future. Not just music--perhaps especially so--but all sound is primordial.

I've been on a train at night, and I've heard that damn whistle from close up. It's a sound you learn to block out, especially if you have designs on sleep, but there it is, comforting all the same.

Now, when I'm in the upper berth in a car just behind the locomotive, I have no doubts about from whence comes that sound. But in bed, late at night, I started wondering. Today, at work, I started searching for the answer. It took a few milliseconds. Thanks Google.

That train goes by about mile and a half away to the east of our house, just past Manchaca Road. I'll bet it's at the Ditmar Road crossing where the engineer blows the whistle. I've crossed the tracks hundreds of times over there and have never given it a second thought till last night.

So, what of knowledge? Does it help or hurt the experience?

I am not a fair judge. The train whistle has sentimental, nostalgic meaning to me, so it helps; it moves me. Someone who lives closer to the tracks might also be moved, but perhaps to write a letter of complaint instead of waxing romantic about it in a blog. Distance as well as sentiment has something to do with it.

Right, but how far? What is the extent of this capacity?

A mile and half seems like a fair distance from which one can be moved, till I realize that I am also similarly moved by the sight of the sunset over Lake Michigan, a golden harvest moon hanging low at the end of the our street, or the sight of Venus in the early evening sky anywhere on Earth.

The capacity of the mind to measure the great--the vast Unknown--with the small--a tiny bit of Knowledge--is indeed one of our greatest gifts.

Life at the Top

One fate befalls the self assured.
Some just believe their every word.
They'll deny it. Say it's absurd.
Though ne'er to others have they deferred.

Oh, they began with good intents
Fueled by passion (in their defense)
But all that sycophancy most intense
Obliterated their common sense.

A Long Ride B.C.

I had a very cranky bus driver this morning. I almost got kicked off for drinking coffee!

It started when I got on and took my seat. The driver played a message over the speakers:

"Passengers may not eat or drink aboard the bus."

So I look around. There's a girl in the seat next to me eating some cereal out of a ziploc bag. He must mean her, I think.

She's also drinking water out of a reusable, closeable bottle but I figure it's the cereal he doesn't like. She grabs a couple of bits, and puts the bag back in her backpack. She takes a drink of water. At the next stop, the driver stops the bus, jumps out of his seat and storms back to confront her.

He waggles his finger the girl, telling her he "done told you twice!"

She looks shocked but apparently, he has warned her before, because she says something like, "You only warned me once."

"Next time," he says, "I won't even let you on."

This is lame, but I'm now thinking, "Does he mean coffee in closed containers too? Does he mean me?"

So I take a sip, to test this hypothesis.

I can see him glaring at me in the rearview mirror. He plays the damn message again:

"Passengers may not eat or drink aboard the bus."

So I become more discrete, sipping when he has to drive. I am sure he sees me out of the corner of his eye, but he can either be a driver or an enforcer, not both at the same time.

Then someone else gets on with a closed coffee cup. She sits down. He plays the damn message again:

"Passengers may not eat or drink aboard the bus."

She isn't listening. It is 7.45 am for crying out loud!

As he pulls away from the curb, he slams on the brakes in a pique and looks back at the new culprit. She is oblivious, so he waves his arms and says, "Nuh-uh"

She gets the message, and even though I can't see her expression, I am sure she's shocked too.

I don't know what the actual rule is. A friend of mine who rides the bus a lot more than I do tells me this is probably within the driver's rights, but I have to say it makes for a long ride BC (Before Coffee).

Odd Old Habits and Global Change

Years ago, when I was a kid, I developed what some would consider to be an odd habit. I picked up litter.

I don't remember exactly when I started doing it, but it was likely when we lived in San Antonio, because that's where I have my first clear memory of it. Abilene, where we lived before moving to the city, was relatively rural and litter, while present, was a less common sight.

On my walk to school from the Seven Pines Apartments however, it was a very common sight, and I began to pick up litter I found along the way. There was big dumpster at the corner of the parking lot where I entered the school yard. I would toss the stuff I collected. Usually this amounted to just paper, because in those days, pop bottles had a deposit so people seldom threw them away, and cans, believe it or not, were relatively new.

So it was mostly newspapers and bits of metal and plastic that caught my eye. It was never so much that I couldn't carry it; always just a piece or two. I didn't pick up cigarette butts because, well, they were (still are) gross. But for the rest of it, within reason (I didn't go into or cross the street or pick up old washing machines and spare tires) I just made a game of picking up litter.

The motivation was from several directions. For one thing, I am something of a neat freak, so I enjoy the sight of a litter free landscape. And, when I got started, the logic seemed simple to me. And, as a sixth grader whose other pastime was dumpster diving, I kind of enjoyed picking up junk. So I did, much to Lynda's chagrin.

I believe that I was also motivated by the idea that if everyone would not only pick up most of what they accidentally dropped (life happens, right?), but if they would pick up just a bit of what others dropped, we might keep things picked up. I was so young that it seemed like a simple equation.

Lest you think, Dear Reader, that I imagine that I was some sort of special gifted child, I assure you this was not the case. Consider that it I wasn't being driven by an altogether altruistic motive but was merely attracted by junk. Having said that, though, I do think that there was an element of emerging community concern in my actions if only as a reaction to the nascent field of environmental marketing.

Back in the Sixties, when I came to this consciousness, anti-litter and anti-pollution campaigns were just getting started, and the roots of todays suddenly-chic environmentalism were taking hold. I did this for many many years, right through college and grad school and the births of my children.

At some point, however, I stopped.

I don't know if this had to do with getting older and/or busier, but I am more likely to ascribe it to a general loss of optimism and resignation to a fate I had no control over. This mindset was far from overt, as I simply managed to not think about it, even as it became more obvious that I could and should still be doing it. See no evil...

In a recent talk in a class called Perspectives of the Future, a professor recalled the memory of noted UT astronomer and futurist Harlan Smith. He had the habit of picking up newspapers off the ground whenever he walked across campus.

When asked why he would attempt to keep up with what it seemed to be obviously a futile effort, Dr. Smith replied that as far as he was concerned, the effort wasn't in vain. He was a mathematician, after all. He noted that statistically, it only takes one person out of a thousand who will pick up the newspapers to keep the campus free of waste papers.

That is a powerful thought. Not everyone has to contribute to environmental remediation--or, for that matter any serious problem facing mankind--in order to effect change. The actions of a few can and do affect the many.

It's a simple fact. We don't all have to be convinced that change is necessary in order for change to happen. We just have be willing to do it ourselves.

I'm going back to my old habit.

Murder or Suicide?

America has in fact transformed journalism from what it once was, the periodical expression of the thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of contemporary life, into an agency for collecting, condensing and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human existence, [...] the frantic haste with which we bolt everything we take, seconded by the eager wish of the journalist not to be a day behind his competitor, abolishes deliberation from judgment and sound digestion from our mental constitutions. We have no time to go below surfaces, and as a general thing no disposition.

Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1891, journalist W.J. Stillman decried the effects of the telegraph on his profession.

This could have been written by an editor of a soon-to-be-out-of-business newspaper in any one of a hundred or more towns and cities last year alone. To update the story, instead of the Telegraph, we need simply substitute the Internet as the cause of the current malaise.

Oh really? Is the internet killing newspapers, or are they committing suicide?

Now, since newspapers not only survived but thrived after the invention of the telegraph, and the telephone and the television, I am prompted to ask why it should be that the internet has managed this feat in 'just one blow' to quote a famous folk tale. Has video really killed the radio star?

I mean, is the Internet really revolutionary, or simply evolutionary?

This may sound like splitting a semantic hairs, but the distinction is a crucial one, I think. It seems like a no-brainer to label the Internet as a revolution in human history when presented with 'evidence' like the way in which it has ruthlessly gutted the newspaper industry in the past ten years.

I don't think so, and here's why.

Just the other day, I read in the Daily Texan a letter to the editor that amounted to a correction even though the editor made no official comment on the letter. The letter writer was pointing out that a recent article--an opinion column, to be more precise--had erred significantly its portrayal of the University Scholastic League (UIL).

Among other things, the writer of the column misunderstood the relationship between the University and the UIL, the source of the UIL's funding and even most telling of all, the UIL's basic mission.

As the letter writer (who was in fact the Regional Director of the UIL) pointed out, a simple call to the UIL would have found someone more than willing to talk about the program and give the 'reporter' all the significant information they would have needed to write a good solid story about the UIL.

Except that the 'reporter' had no intention of doing that.

Instead, in an attempt to make their story line as sensational as possible, the student who wrote the article decided to eschew actual interviews with the principals in favor of their pre-fixed opinion and went ahead with a strident call for the elimination of the UIL program as both wasteful of University money and as an ineffective recruiting tool for students.

Of course the UIL is neither. Thousands of high school students from all over the state compete in Austin every year for hundreds of awards, ranging from literary to athletic. Further, not only does the University Scholastic League not rely on UT for its funding, it also doesn't serve as a recruiting tool for the University. In fact, the mission of the UIL is a public service, which the University facilitates as part of its larger role in State government.

Now, I know I've gone into excruciating detail here, but forgive me, because I hope for this to be more than a general rant. It is not the Internet but the phenomenon of lazy and false journalism that is to blame for newspapers' current demise and there are plenty of specific cases out there in almost every newspaper every day that prove the point.

To ward off the most obvious criticism, I will agree with potential critics who will say that my example, taken from a student newspaper after all, is unfair. The writers there are just learning their trade, right?

However true that may be, for evidence of this phenomenon in the 'professional' ranks, one need look no further than the daily rag, the Austin American Statesman. This newspaper has, for as long as I've been in Austin (40+ years), been on the decline.

I know this because I delivered papers for the Austin Statesman back in 1969, when there were still two 'newspapers' in town. Even then, even as a thirteen year old reading only the front page as I rolled and banded them on the front porch after school, I knew was what I was delivering to the doorsteps of that West Austin neighborhood was truly a poor excuse for a newspaper.

This was a long time ago, dear reader. This was before I'd taken any classes in journalism, before I had any notion that I'd someday be a co-editor of my high school newspaper, before I had any ambitions to be a journalist and, of course, way before the internet gave me opportunity to actually write for both of you.

Like the demise of the traditional auto and music industries, it's been a long time coming. My verdict? Suicide, not murder.

Two Years On

As both readers of this journal will have noted, the frequency, if not the length of my posts has decreased.

This has as much or more to do with my mental health as anything else, and I am happy to report that it is actually a good sign. This is not just because it realizes a net reduction in the number of words to which I subject my readers, but because it's good evidence that I no longer have the desperate need to write as a form of therapy.

Still here I am, two years after Pierre's death, struggling to find meaning without writing, and still failing, albeit not as catastrophically as before.

While it would seem that maudlin introspection is required to inspire me to write, of late I have been cursed with a good mood and a productive agenda which leaves little time for self-flagellating prose. Unless, of course, you count this piece, though I may not fulfill that expectation either.

Actually, in spite of the anniversary just passed, and in spite of the fact that it is cold, grey and wet today, I can't claim to be in a wretched mood. Perhaps my upbeat mental state has something to do with the fact that it actually snowed here today, but more likely it's because I just don't have a reason to be as depressed as I used to be.

I got pretty low last week, especially on the day before the anniversary. But, I spent a lot of time thinking about how and where I'd been just two years ago. Curiously, these were not the same anguished and self-doubting thoughts that have plagued me since the day of his death.

But why should they be? That's easy. There's no need. But, what do I think about now? What I know to be true about myself now?

One thing is certain: I have changed, yet again. I am no longer in mourning. Misery is no longer comfortable; Hurt no longer needs the daily attention I used to give it.

Simply put, I have gone back to living.

You know, I don't know if it's living well (have I ever lived well?), but I do know that my life requires more than anger or anguish.

For me, to live requires plans for the future and love of the moment. I have both.

Inspiration

What is inspiration? What is inspiring?

The recent decision to scrap NASA's mission to return to the Moon has many people wondering what happened to that great sense of inspired destiny that seemed to guide the original Moon mission.

Where, they wonder, is the inspiration that NASA brought to that generation? What they wonder, is left to inspire us if our quest to explore space is abandoned?

First of all, I have to say that 'abandoning' the Mission to the Moon Redux makes good sense. Really it does. For one thing, sensible aerospace engineers know--and have long known--that no matter what the political will might be at any given moment, human space exploration will not even advance to and certainly not go beyond the Moon for very long--as in many decades--time.

There are a number of reasons for this reality, not the least of which is the fact that we do not have any real need--scientific or political--to go back.

Scientifically, we need look no further than the well-known but never-remembered Van Allen Belts, which so effectively protect us from deadly cosmic radiation here on Earth that we conveniently forget that they are there. However, humans cannot survive more than a few weeks outside their range, which is just a few thousand miles above the surface.

So, all other things being equal (which they are not) it's really not the getting back to the Moon that poses the real problem for today's technology, but the staying there that would be deadly.

This means that while our currently most visible presence in space, the International Space Station (ISS), is a relatively safe (ad)venture, ambitions that take humans out of low earth orbit for any length of time are, for the moment, actually the stuff of science fiction.

Travel to other planets is even more unlikely. For example, humans traveling to Mars would receive lethal doses of radiation (accumulated in weeks) on the trip over (which takes years).

In any event, American astronauts are not likely to go much further than the ISS in our lifetimes.

What about the political inspiration that a Moon mission might create? Isn't that what the first mission was really all about? Perhaps it was, but historically speaking, this is one of those cases where you want to be careful about what you wish for.

It's been said that going to the Moon was the biggest political setback for science in the twentieth century. At first, I thought this was a merely inflammatory statement meant to rile up those of us that grew up during the Space Race and those who still have faith in the power of technology to change our lives.

However, the more I think about it, the less it sounds like heresy and the more it sounds like truth.

Why? Well, even though going to the Moon was touted as a great and unprecedented scientific achievement, we all know it was in fact more of a political and engineering achievement. And yet, the real irony is that even when measured in those terms, it falls considerably short of success.

In fact, by almost any definition the Moon mission was actually a failure.

Oh sure, we got some things, like Velcro and Tang, but what did going to the Moon and back really do for us? By do I mean what changes have we seen in our society and the culture that defines us? And by us I mean all humans, not just Americans.

The answer, I am afraid, is not so much. But was it a failure in inspiration or merely in execution? In other words, should we try again?

Other than all the new things cluttering the global marketplace, are there any new ideas or directions for us, our children, or our species that grew out of the Moon mission?

Who, exactly, did the Moon mission inspire?

Did it inspire scientists, artists and politicians? Yes, perhaps, briefly. Did it inspire "the public"? Did it move the Wheel of History? Yes, in many ways. Did it really change our lives? Here I am not so sure.

I can only speak for myself. As an twelve year-old boy sitting front of a tiny black-and-white television set in July of 1969, I was inspired. Or at least that's what I'd like to think. Yet, even as I write this, I am still unsure.

The reason I'm unsure is because even now I wonder what, if anything, did sitting in front of the television, looking at those amazing but almost indecipherable images actually inspire me to do? And if they weren't the spark that lit my fire, so to speak, what was? What has inspired me?

Words.

Although I consider myself to be a poorly read dilettante at best, especially in comparison with say, Lynda, her friend Len Radoff, or my brother Stephen, as I look back, it is apparent that words have been the principal source of inspiration in my life outside of my family.

It is more than fair to say that authors like L'Engle, Clarke, Bradbury, Silverberg, Heinlein St. Exupery and Vonnegut have changed my life. I'm not just talking about science fiction and romance either. Obviously there are too many other authors who have inspired me to list here and I haven't even touched on the Poets.

So, I still read about space and technology every day, following all the details like I was still eleven years old. I still hope to get to Florida this year for one of the remaining four Shuttle launches. And, if Richard Branson ever gets his act together (and I find a spare 200K) I may yet have the opportunity to go into 'space'.

More likely, though, I will be able to get by on the inspiration that has served me and so many millions of my fellow humans for so many generations: the word.