Quotidian

Midnight, Addison Texas. The low haze that swept in after sunset is all alight now, bouncing back the city like the sky is enclosed in a single mercury bulb. The lights of the bank offices and insurance companies north of the belt line float in it, outlines of their buildings obscured by bright haze.

This has been my quotidian, my every day, for two years now. This little two meter square balcony. The skyview that has been my most constant companion. I am grateful for it, I would have lost my mind down here without it.

I never wanted to come South. Spent my 20s proudly remaining above the Mason-Dixon even as everyone else my age seemed to migrate to the sunbelt for work. Eventually, the migration caught up with me, and brought me first to Atlanta, and then here to Dallas. They became my quotidian. Okra in the supermarket. Sweet tea everywhere. Sky glow. In Atlanta I could only glimpse it through the canopy but here...

I am looking out at Addison, right now, and the sky is all alight, brighter than any star, horizon to horizon. The only lights you can see are planes, sometimes 5 or 6 at once when traffic is stacked up over DFW. Down here, in the urban south, there is a starless quotidian.

Which I hated, for a long time. But it came to me to seem vibrant, alive. The glow of a place filled with furious human activity. Of a place people wanted to be.

And now that I'm going back North, to a sleepy Pennsylvania college town where the nearest city's population peaked in 1940 and is now half its former size, I think I'll miss that. The youth. The glow.

Still. I'll have the stars again, at least.

Skyglow

If this front doesn't break soon, I will. 83 and muggy in April is just uncalled for. Uncalled for, Dallas.

I'm going to sit and watch the skyglow for a bit and see if the rain starts. Its an activity that calls for whiskey, but I'm out of calories for the day so I'll have to stick to sparkling water.

I love useless moments like this, waiting on the rain and listening to the hum of the highway. They are so far and few between these days. So threatened by our constant productivity. My latest theory project is trying to find some framework for articulating this love. I tried Marcuse, but he was no help. Sartre everyone told me to stay away from. Right now, Agamben seems like my best hope? Dunno, hard to say.

Somehow, I need to figure through a way to argue that the useless is not useless. That it is, in fact, crucial. Human. That it's availability, and its shape, should not be left to the whims of market aristocrats. That we need a democratic uselessness.

Anyway, that will be for another day. Right now, gonna see if this front breaks.

If you only read on explanation of the Marxist concept of "commodity fetishism" today, make it this solid summary of the idea and how its misuse in contemporary scholarship by Gavin of Unfashionably Late.

Gavin is also one of the under-appreciated stars of Marxist-Leninist weird twitter.

The problem with "the future"

Bruce Sterling's 2013 SXSW benediction has been talked about over the course of the last month or so, as is usually the case with his contributions to the conference. Cory Doctorow clearly got a kick out of it.

I thought it was great, thought-provoking stuff. The piece still hasn't been transcribed anywhere, so I ended up listening to it on my phone while I took a walk around the neighborhood. This made his discussion of the disruption of long form text by short form always-on media all the more cogent.

I particularly liked the part where cranky old Bruce really lets fly about the state of things to his audience of boosters and entrepreneurs and tech wizards. "Everything is getting worse," he yells at them, almost to the point of his voice breaking. Despite all their talk of "making the world a better place" through "disruptive technology," the climate, politics, the economy, all are in decline. "Where's the betterness?" He asks.

Thus, I was a little confused by his ending, which sounded what seemed to be a triumphalist note. He encourages his argument to take responsibility for "killing the past" and then to "kill it and eat it" anyway. The future (I'm paraphrasing here because digging the exact language out of the audio in the clunky soundstream format the piece is being shared in is a pain) will be and must be built on the ruins of the past.

In retrospect, I think I understand what Sterling is going for. He wants to avoid what he perceives as a sort of guilt-laden retreat from movement and experimentation. The tendency that makes young people enamored of home-pickling and infatuated with the futile notion of returning to subsistence farming. An attempt to return to a romanticized past (as perhaps I am engaged in as I attempt to revive this blog in a weekend of manic posting!).

But the language of "The Future" and "The Past," so common to this sort of discourse, shifts Sterling's argument in a way that partially erases his careful critique of disruption-as-progress from only moments before. In a sense the language is similar to that used by RIP: A Remix Manifesto when it argues that the fight over Copyright is one in which "the past" (in the form of big media companies) attempts to control "the future"  (in the form of Girl Talk, mostly).

I would suggest that rather than exhorting people to take up the cause of building "The Future," despite the cost, we might more acutely need to focus on the idea (which Sterling motions to) of thinking about taking responsibility for the future we build. Given that creation is indeed, always creative destruction, shouldn't we make sure that what we build balances what has been lost?

And moreover, the discussion of a monolithic "Future" conceals the fact that that future will be experienced differently by different people. We have a responsibility to build our futures in a way that does not immiserate the futures of others. This is something that the young, rich, powerful future builders at places like SXSW seem increasingly blind to. We need a future for everyone, not just the best and brightest and most innovative.

To talk about "a future" rather than "the future" might at least move us in the direction of understanding that while future change is indeed inevitable, the direction of that change is not.

Elemental Dallas

One of my favorite undergraduate professors was a bit of a theory throwback. He still identified as a Freudian, long after trends had moved to continental philosophy. He taught the survey of methods in Literary Criticism course I took, which might explain why I'm not exactly a cutting edge theorist today.

Somewhere along the way, he worked in the idea of analyzing pieces based on the four classical elements. I have no idea where this came from. As scholarship, it seems doubtful, as a habit of mind I can't seem to shake it. Confronted with something new, I often find myself thinking: "Water, Earth, Air, or Fire?"

Atlanta, as a city, was clearly claimed by water. It rained in the sort of torrents I had only ever seen last an hour in other places for days on end. Even during a supposed drought, the summer was sticky and had you drenched in your own sweat in minutes.

Dallas, on the other hand, is a city that all but water seems to have a hold on. Earth, for the flat plains and endless dust. Fire for the baking sun. Air for the wind and the constant air traffic, and the open, cloudless sky.

In the end, though, I think this is a city of air. Seen from above, Dallas is a patchwork of uninterrupted light, since there are no trees tall enough to break line of sight to an airliner on final approach. The city is naked to the sky.

And that sky has been a source of endless fascination for me living here. There are aircraft aloft within view of my balcony more often than not. The airport to my north hosts quite a diverse set, long ezs, Beech Starships, the last flying B-29.

The birds are even more interesting than the planes. Falcons pushing flocks of starlings around the sky like sharks on shoals of herring. A few nights ago, I was sitting out before bed and heard a strange, rattling cry. I looked up and there was a checkmark of Egrets, white bellies lit orange in the streetlight, flying across the night sky in inverted silhouette.

Even here, in the suburbs of Dallas, the most domesticated and controlled place you could imagine, the sky is still wild. Just like the Firefly theme song said it would be :)  

Why I want you to read this blog

I'm going to ask you to indulge me for just a minute. 

Actually, I'm going to ask you to indulge me for just a minute, a couple times of week, for the foreseeable future. 

I'm asking you to read this blog. Blogging, which was for a brief moment a prime means for people to keep in touch, seems of late to have been mostly displaced by social networking, especially Facebook, which allows for more robust content than the ultra-concise Twitter. 

I've thought about leaving Facebook, especially given its increasingly worrisome ambitions. I'm not sure I want Facebook to become a general-purpose portal for digital content. I'm quite certain I don't want it to become a geo-political entity "on par with nations." Still, at this point choosing to exit Facebook seems like choosing to stop listening to my friends, colleagues and neighbors. Like ignoring their lives in a profoundly anti-social way. No, until such a time as we can migrate the network somewhere else, Facebook seems to be an evil we're stuck with. 

Still, there is something about the Facebook composition experience that leaves me feeling like something is missing. Something we had back in the moment of personal blogging. We seem to have lost the space of our own that blogs once provided. A space in between the more formal and controlled writing of published work (including work published on higher-profile, edited group blogs) and the constant rolling present of the social network. A space where a draft of a thought too big to fit in an update status can be hashed out over the course of a day. A space we control, and thus can navigate and retrieve thoughts from the archive more readily. 

Of course, we haven't really lost this space. This blog has still been here, unused, all these years. What we've lost are readers coming to the space. I can link to my blog, but doing that is asking an indulgence. Leave the stream of the rolling now for a few minutes and come pay attention just to me! Just dropping the link in the stream isn't enough to compel anybody to click on it (my Google analytics suggest).

So, I'm asking that indulgence, dear reader. Click the link. I could just keep posting stuff here and dropping links and hoping for the best, but writing is hard when you know no one is reading. Help me out. 

Here's what I'll promise you in return. If and when you revive your old blog, and start dropping links into the rolling present, I'll click on them :-)

A modest MOOC-posal

Proposition 1: Only the most excellent teachers can teach well enough to out-perform MOOCs

Proposition 2: MOOCs can teach the skills ordinary people need to become excellent

Conclusion: Run a MOOC to teach teaching and make MOOCs obsolete

Turing Test

The first short story I ever wrote was called "Turing Test." It imagined a young man fooled into corresponding with a computer. The punchline was, the machine was in no way alive. It was just crudely recycling phrases from a linguistic database.

It wasn't a very strong story really. The way I conveyed the computer's patchwork prose was clunky and obvious and unconvincing. But the idea of it sticks with me. Especially as we're now hearing about machines that write news articles and grade student essays.

There are many valid criticisms of these sorts of efforts. At least one prominent young cultural critic has been on twitter all day laying into the idea that machines can think. Indeed, the firms behind these automated techniques have every reason to spin and hype their machines well beyond their actual capabilities.

Still, I think it is worth taking the idea that they might succeed seriously.

I guess I find the notion of an external machine automaton writing plausible because, for me, the experience of writing is one of being dependent on internal, biological automata. I don't always know exactly where the words come from or why they go together. They just show up, sort of, and I put them down on the page. Often, they emulate the voice of an author I've recently been reading. I sometimes think of the unconscious-me that serves up words as my "language engine."

This is why I sometimes struggle to teach writing. Because I, myself, am not always consciously aware of how it is that I come to write.

I'm pretty sure the science fiction author William Gibson is talking about a similar writing experience when he talks about writing as a process he carries out as a collaboration with his "subconscious" in the documentary No Maps For These Territories. So I'm guessing this isn't just me.

Thus, we are confronted with yet another specter: the spectre of the preconscious writing machine, which is the spectre of the final and ultimate unbundling: that of productive work and lived experience.

For even as authors may have lived with the language engines inside our heads for a very long time, we still felt to some degree coextensive with them. And in any event, we could not be separated, if you wanted it, you had to feed us. And our relationship with it felt so intimate, it was part of our everyday life, our identity, our expression. Every word to a loved one, every argument with a rival, it was embedded in it all.

So surely, we must have thought, this cannot be alienated. Long after the ditch digger and the line worker and even the musician have been automated out of existence, we will still be here. Surely language is the fundamental measure of the human. It is the core, after all, of the humanities.

But what if, what if, it isn't anymore, within our lifetimes? What if experience must face the world alone, shorn of productive value?

What then?

Your Web App is not Beautiful

I realize that what I am about to write is useless, my participation in a long and futile tradition of pedants and curmudgeons trying to stop the shift of a living language beneath their feet. I realize that language is too big and too messy to shape by will.

Still, I feel compelled to say something about this particular linguistic shift.

Listen, your digital mailbox application is not "beautiful."

Your widgets are not "beautiful."

Your web toolkit is not "beautiful."

Your bookmarking application is not beautiful. Your css template is not beautiful. Your CMS is not beautiful. Your LMS is not beautiful.

Oh, they are slick and pleasant and well-designed and nice to use. You deserve credit for that, it is nice to have well-designed stuff in one's life. But these things are not "beautiful", I really must insist.

What is beautiful? That's going to vary, person to person but let me give a quick catalog of things that work for me, just off the top of my head.

The final few lines of "O Holy Night" (the bit that goes "fall on your knees/oh hear the angel voices...") sung by a really good soprano in an old echoey church at midnight mass on Christmas Eve.

The moment when you first emerge from your cabin in the Las Cruces, New Mexico KOA after rolling in after dark the night before and dawn reveals that there is a whole valley down below you and another ridgeline across from you and the pale blue desert sky above.

Blowing off undergrad classes to lie on a cold concrete campus bench and feel spring come back into the world and the afternoon goes on for what seems like forever.

Crossing the dunes between the bay side of Jones Beach and the ocean side for the first time as a child and being stunned by the vast purple expanse of the Atlantic being right there when you thought all there was was that muddy brown bay.

What's common for all of these is some sense of the profound, the larger than the self. Some sense of relief, for just a moment, of the pressing limits of human mortality. A brief and transient experience of the eternal.

Do the lovely, pleasant, rounded buttons on your web console do that, even for you, it's creator? No?

Then please, don't call it "beautiful."

Charlotte International Airport

There is an impromptu veterans' reunion between rows 13 and 14

Together they count through the locations

Kuwait

Doha

Ramadi

The first one says

"Me, I was in tanks

they would call us in

and tell us put that main gun

on them buildings"

He stops

The second one asks,

"Why don't they just put

more doors on these planes

so we don't all have to go

through one little door?"

Dallas to Nashville 12/12/11

When departing Dallas, you should plan a route that clears the Dallas-Fort-Worth-Metropolitan Axis as rapidly as possible, like escaping the gravity well of a dying star or the blast radius of a dirty bomb. Then begin travelling in the direction of your destination.

From the interstate, 90% of America is effectively the same hedgerow, interspersed with the same strip mall. I suspect strip mall architecture, like the 747 and the BSD kernel, is one of those mid-twentieth century engineering stop-gap measures that has seamlessly slid from temporary stand-in to workhorse to cultural motif.

The highway interchange connecting Houston to Texarkana smells like cabbage and natural gas. Surely no one is surprised by this.

Arkansas is bigger than you expect it to be. It might be a tardis.

The nickname of Arkansas is "the Natural State." In the sort of ironic move one expects of the United States, it has devoted its southern half almost entirely to poorly regulated heavy industry.

There is a young man in Little Rock driving a Honda Prelude that must be a full decade older than himself. At the remarkable, seemingly impossible, speed of ninety-five miles an hour, its heavily modified and egregiously abused exhaust system emits a brutal, death metal vocal solo sound like a buzzsaw being mounted by an amorous yak.

Walt Whitman and I love this young man quite tenderly, and we admire his courage, even if it is born of ignorance.

Somewhere in the Arkansas alluvial plain, there is a place where massive aerials and giant steel signs bearing the ancient brand XXX sprout. They bloom in the same shade of red. There may have been some cross pollination. Please don't touch your dials.

Tennessee smells of paraffin.

In which I pretend to be Carver 2

"Anyway," she says, "I should go. Work tomorrow"

"So what," I say, "it's seven."

"Seven there," she says, "ten here, and Dan just got the baby to sleep and he hardly ever sleeps."

The baby.

"Get some rest, be well." I say. She hangs up.

I open another beer and stare out into the rain. The drops hit the wet concrete of the alley behind my place and flash like sparks in the streetlight. Like static on the untuned screen of reality.

I think about the path of each drop falling to the pavement. Once, I heard on public television that things only happen the way they do because we see them the way they are. That somehow everything that could happen has, that there are other universes where the static pattern of rain drops I'm looking at is different, because the drops all fell a different way. Public television said that all those other universes are only a tiny distance away from us, but the direction to them is one we can't ever see. It's hidden down deep in the world, smaller than we can know.

There are other versions of me, I think, looking at other patterns of rain. Near to me as my own blood.

I wonder if I stare at the rain long enough, the pattern might shift without me knowing it, might switch over to some other scrambled channel.

I stare for a long while.

Why I cringe when someone says "Human Nature"

It's not because such a thing couldn't exist, it almost certainly does. There is nothing magic about our species, after all, we are just a strange electric topology that dreams. No, I cringe at the phrase because it's forever bandied about as if "human nature" could be contained in a slogan, an axiom, maybe a philosophy. This is absurd. Human nature is the novel of novels, the story of billions of people over the course of thousands of years. It is the phase space of every story ever written.

Seattle 2011 Part 2

Seattle is like Ithaca New York with an industrial base, ten times the population, and access to a major body of salt water and a mountain range.

I spent all afternoon walking along the waterfront. At one point, this pair of tall young women were walking along the same route I was. We were both stopping to look at the sound, or down at the sea stars in the surf, and so we'd overtake each other from time to time. At one point, as they overtook me, I heard the blond one say to her brunette friend, "I mean, I like cheese, but I don't understand why *you* like cheese."

I almost said something at that point, but I'm pretty sure they'd noticed me, and it seemed weird.

Seattle 2011

So, I'm drinking beer in the Holiday Inn hotel bar in Seattle. Don't ask me how I always end up in these places, I once spent 72 hours in Copenhagen and ate half my meals at the shawarma stand in the train station. What can I say, sandwiches were cheap, left me more money for Tuborg.

Anyway, I'm in this Holiday Inn bar. Food is awful. Beer is good, some sort of local pale ale. This bottle blond waitress in a navy blue work shirt is putting up fake cobwebs and orange Christmas lights for Halloween. That sort of place. I'm watching the National League Playoffs on one of the flatscreens. I only watch baseball in the post season because it lets me play politics by proxy via sport. I cheer for leftist cities over conservative cities, free states over right to work states, and teams without unholy amounts of money over the Yankees.

But really, I'm not watching baseball. I mean, I'm looking at the TV but I'm paying attention to two or three conversations going on in the bar. An older woman in a red sweatshirt is kind of sort of flirting with this guy sitting next to her, while her husband looks on. It's nothing really, just the way married people sometimes get sometimes when they want someone new to talk to. She puts her hand on his elbow when she gets up to go to the bathroom. At least, I think she does. I'm trying not to look, and frankly, my peripheral vision is shit in these glasses.

And this kid in the table in the back corner is just killing. He's got friends, and family too I guess, just packed in back there and he's got them all around his little finger. He launches in to some story about how he got cut off from ordering drinks on the flight out here. "I step out of the bathroom," he says, "and the stewardess is waiting for me, and she tells me, 'I can't serve you anymore, we've had complaints'" and then he waits, just this perfect beat before he goes on, "and I'm like, 'FROM THE WHOLE PLANE?'" His voice cracks at the end. The whole booth howls with laughter. I've had nights like his. I know he'll be trying to get that beat just right the next 4 times he tells that story, and it will never be right, he'll try like mad to get it back and it will never quite be right. Sorry kid, guess that's why we aren't professionals.

In which I pretend to be Carver

Sometimes, I still call her up.

When she picks up, I say "I feel like we're all living too much in our heads now, too much in our screens. I'd be happier if I could get in touch with the real world again. Maybe work with my hands. Maybe cook."

"You were never any good with your hands," she says.

"That's cold," I say.

"I didn't mean it like that," she says, and I can hear her smile a little and that makes me feel good, but then she goes on, "I mean you could never cook. Not seriously. Remember that time you stuck yourself with a knife? You're too blunt, all thumbs."

I think about it for a minute, then I say, "it's not me that's blunt, its the world."

"Yeah," she says, "I guess that's about right."

The line is very quiet. You can't hear a dead telephone anymore. I'm not sure I can really remember when you could. How can you tell if a thing like that exists at all, if you can't even hear it hiss?

"You still there?" I ask.

"I guess," she says.

When Rain

I will remember the sky here.

When rain finally comes,

the air itself glows

like some cliche about a pregnant mother.

During the day,

the glow was storm light

but now, Dallas night light

paints sprinting low clouds yellow

orange, and, in one spot over an Addison restaurant

purple, like the ground effect on a low rider.

Family Tradition (fragment)

We are a people;
who stare out into middle distance.

My father would stand in the kitchen of my grandfather's apartment
smoking under the humming exhaust fan
staring into some undiscovered country
in the cabinet where the old man kept his cheerios.

As for me, I remember places I have lived
by the things I stared out at during long sleepless nights.

In Ohio, it was a tiny shoddy house,
a sort of standalone tenement apartment,
placed inexplicably in the parking lot of the cement factory
opposite me. The lights there came on at ten,
burned all night, an old Chrysler was parked outside.

In Atlanta, it was the rain,
and the monster subtropical trees the rain summoned up from the earth.
I would sip beer under the yellow security light of the apartment complex;
watch the orb spider string anchor lines across the branches
listen to the freight trains coast by in the dark
engines off, wheels screeching and links chiming.

Here in Dallas, it is the clear Texas sky, the purple and red of the vast sunset.
Sitting in the dark, the constant air traffic into DFW reminds me,
of our opulent oil driven moment, the continuing clatter of global capitalism,
just as buzzing prop planes lining up for approach
at the little private field two miles north, remind me of its romance.

Morning, Texas 09.22.2011

I am driving to work
the highway is North Texas concrete, dull and yellow
I am drinking bad coffee I brewed from good beans
a flash of movement makes me check the mirror
a boy and a girl are dashing past behind me
making the best of a break in the traffic
I want to tell you something about their hair, their clothes
so we can both remember this moment
but I've forgotten all of that
all I remember is the dark slashes of their bodies
crane-like lines against the sullen morning sky,
the precious, slender bridge of their linked hands
and their laughing smiles as they bound the last steps to the curb
they have survived their morning crossing
they are alive

Why I want to teach in the Failure Program

The school I teach for now, like all the schools I've taught for, has a boatload of "Student Success Programs." Clever pedagogical experiments designed to prepare students to succeed, to lead, to excel.

I wish them luck, but I don't want to work for them.

I want to teach in the Failure Program. I want to look students in the eye, and say, listen, competitive systems, they have losers. I'm glad that you are all planning on being winners, I am, but you do realize there is a good chance that, well, that won't work out for all of you? Statistics, you know...

I've tried compassion. I've tried saying, well yes, but what about those losers, over there, shouldn't we be nice to them? Compassion doesn't work. The other always deserves what she gets.

I tiptoe around my relatively moderate anti-property authors. I preface everything with, "well, this author says." I suggest, mildly, that maybe there might be some trade off between community good and individual riches. They shake their heads. They look confused. I am not preparing them to succeed. Haven't I heard? They are all going to be rich. Why trade that for some lousy public good? Don't I know? "Public," means "crappy," like "public school," "public housing," or "public park." Why mingle with the riffraff?

I want to shake them. I want to shout, "Listen!!!!!" and then whisper, "you're dying." We all lose to death in the end, children, compassion is self interest. What you would visit on the least among you will be visited upon you, soon enough.