argosy

My Sister, Niece and Nephew have taken it upon themselves to drive across the country this summer (my brother-in-law has signed on to assorted portions of this summer sized junket). That desire to put a car on the road and aim it along a cardinal point is a peculiar - I'd like to say uniquely American - trait but it isn't just an American taste. It's pan cultural, like recipes for bread or dough fried in oil; An insight of my brother-in-law Al - we live in a world united not by love of justice beauty or freedom, but by variations of the doughnut. If the motor tour is not uniquely American it does unite many different types of American. Trail-blazing drummers thrashing across the Midwest and west outward from the rail lines in model-T's full of brushes and cheap vacuums in search of the previous generations of wanderer/homesteader now in need of household accessories. The airstream contingent twentieth century sun gleaming off their polished aluminum westering hulls. Ernest Bourgnine at the wheel of the converted Greyhound Motor home, his Boswell of the interstate, Jeff Krulik, in close formation. Jack Keroac, I read that book - borrowed it from a friend who warned me it wasn't as good as it is talked about - I read it anyway. There was some talk about driving, some talk about benzedrine, a lot of talk about other stuff. I can't remember more than that. My Father, saturated with the mid century love of the day trip delivered our family to most places that could be gotten to in a five hour drive from Boston - and that didn't cost anything once you got there.

A cross country trip is a different animal altogether. It takes an singular spontaneity to put small children in a car and set out for America. The thread of spontaneity does not run through the cloth my sister and I were cut from. Mind , I have three sisters, the weave is a similar fabric for all, but different in small telling ways. Ann's and Mine is most near -notwithstanding the purple border on hers. To me this is a beautiful thing, a grand gesture, optimistic, and romantic. Granted A lot of people find reason to drive across the country. Some do it regularly, but in a country of 260 or so million many never do. They don't because the bug never bites, because it never occurs to them that there is anything to see beyond their own little world. That time and opportunity is never right The children too young or too old, but never the right age what ever that could possibly be.

My Grandfather had friends with an airstream trailer, and they drove it around. His dream was to do the same when he retired. He was a methodist preacher and never allowed himself any long vacations, he fixed himself up with a cottage on the Cape in '47, but after twenty summers of buzzard bay idyll the dream of the roads across America burned bright within him. My Grandmother thought it should wait until his retirement. He never made that trip. Something to observe about life generally, maybe. I won't stop it from going there. But the only point I intended to make was one can only understood this culture through direct investigation. Television, books, magazines, movies can only let you know its out there - you've got to go to it, see it, smell it, touch it, to really know anything about it. You may have to invent or borrow a reason to embark on the enterprise and It will probably seem a little artificial or hokey - until you get on the road. Lewis and Clark needed a letter from the President to set off, but it would have required more than that to make them turn back once they were on their way.

Garden. a poem

Garden
Numero deus impare gaudet -Virgil

On the left
in the corner sod - the persistent annual
Hymenocallis Narrcissiflora
newnamed Ismene - holds out holds down
diffident desiccated - truculent timid
by turns - by days breeze blown
in left right twists turn - heft of heavy bulb
held in hand - dropt down again
into dark ground
attached turns towards light
away.
Broad and bending leaves - trimmed into narrow space
protected
shoots encroaching culled
unmoved by surrounding plan or profit
fruit or flower Watchful distant
on single faced stalk
silent

!weblog

The subject came up recently -whether it's necessary to read in order to write. The notion I had, unexamined and only partly thought out, was that this meant continuously and concurrently. I affirmed this offhand to the consternation of the person I was speaking with. Who made clear she had read enough, at least for a while. Further reading could only be a distraction to writing she stated. Now I have two advantages in this. The first is that I have never been an English lit major; and so know very little about books and literature. I've read very few books, and I've read them as a tourist in their country when I have. The second is that I work as a clerk in the cataloging dept of a university library where I see many books. Shiny new books with provocative and enticing titles -I see these same books reviewed in the pages of my local big city newspaper on that or the previous weekend. I am endlessly fascinated by books. And I feel that they should all be read. But I could be mistaken.

It's not books I want to talk about right now, but rather web site writing. I read two things a couple of weeks ago which have stuck in my mind. Being somewhat slow witted it usually takes a few weeks or (often) months or years before anything comes of this. The first thing was an article in the current American Journalism Review on Blogging. (Seipp, "Online uprising" 42-47). Oh you want a link you say; you expect a link. Well, bite me junior! I'll let it speak for itself. I've seen it slagged elsewhere and feel no need to do the same, a vague "ballad of a thin man" air hangs about it. But, this can only be the case when one who does not maintain a weblog writes about them. Its strength lies in its summary of the attitudes of professional journalists who do and do not run weblogs. Both over-estimate their virtues while remaining blind to their faults. Weblogs are news aggregators not news gathers, what its 'about' is what people think about the news.

I don't run a weblog here. It looks a little like one until you look close, and then you see this is actually a 1997-style home page. Or as I like to think of it - My own personal chapbook. The differences were clarified for me by the other thing I read a column by Meg Hourihan. Meg was part of Pyra Corp. and was a developer of Blogger( see her piece in Boxes and Arrows on this) She knows a few things about the phenomenon of weblogs. Also there's your link to the Siepp piece in the O'Reilly article. Happy now? Megan takes the position that what makes a weblog is the adherence of the many myriad webloggers to a format. A format that is driven by a particular set of technologies leading to a similar result across products in the field. Further, she says that this has produced a new element to the web at large: a move from the page to the post [entry |article] as the essential atomistic particle of web-meaning, and its future object-of analysis. I can't resist pointing out that in Library work -for series and serials, content has been analyzed and controlled (made citeable, retrievable) to article level for forty years now. And at no little intellectual or monetary expense. Her point is taken; though, it's part of the larger content & knowledge management movement. The stylistic properties of weblogs I follow here stylistically.These elements include: chronologically reverse-ordered entries dated to the day hour and minutes, provision for feedback comments returning to the page as subsequent entries. And signally the use of links over citations for content referrals. Underlying these is a technical refinement I can only approximate. Archives running off databases and SQL scripts, and automated assignment of permanent URL's for individual post level content. These innovations lie at the heart of the self referential web. Bloggers wear their links like hearts on their sleeves - or chips on their shoulders. I find myself more attracted to the more ambitious weblog engines that allow e-zine formats to be assembled, essentially compact content management systems. I would rather not always throw up a link vs a citation or footnote simply because I can, when I think it to parenthetic to my theme. I see this tendency also in the transition from weblog to e-zine. My instinct runs more to commenting and examining beyond the simple pointing behavior of many weblogs. And to admit to a world beyond the electronic, or at least prior to it being made electronic by some other party.

I followed punk rock 'zines once: Conflict, killer, Flipside, Maximum RnR, Truly Needy, Factsheet Five, and of course the transcendent 'Op" ( only later - OPtion) magazine. I valued the do-it-yourself ethic, without making a prejudicial virtue of the amateur aesthetic. I equated it to the "little magazines" phenomenon, and I see e-zines in the same way. You write, you post it, you make it readable in its medium. You make observations, you consider properties, aggregate relationships to the bare thing itself, and in so doing you add value to the observed. That is the invitation for others to read what you write.

A voice in my ear ( imagined but sounding much like the voice of my friend whose phone call started this reverie) adds "and if they come back for more a second time; ask 'em for money"

Some changes to the page

A few minor changes to the look of the front page. Mostly to bring it in line to the way I see it in my mind when I look at it. I've been trying to finish a book, and will return from this pre-occupation to finishing a few pieces for placing here soon.

A Movie Review by my Niece

Movement on other parts of this site~ Which now that I recall, does have other parts, other...unfinished parts. Well, on my Nieces page we have a review of the movie Monsters inc. Which, she actually wrote for me several months ago, but which has only recently (yesterday) come into my hands. It was on their kitchen counter under a weight of papers and what-not so heavy that that counter's molecular structure was compressed to miniture and it is now used as furniture in their dollhouse. True story.

Spiders are Insane

Spiders are insane. They are, the jumping ones I mean. They are completely nuts. I have a number of spiders sharing my apartment with me. I tolerate them, particularly the ones around the periphery. No matter how large they are, or how large they get. They eat the ants; they eat the little bugs that eat my clothes. They earn their keep. After a while I start to recognize some of them as individuals. I do not give them names. The little jumping spiders are curious creatures. Territorial and aggressive beyond all reason they will challenge all intentions on their space. One such octpedal fuzzy pretender has set himself up on my magazine table. A sadly dusty surface with a rarely disturbed chessboard set up on it. The other day while reaching for a book on this table. The spider came tearing out from among the chess pieces a small dot of a thing covered in a handsome coat of fine white brown and black hairs. In a few hops he placed himself between me and the book and started a series of faints at my fingers. I noted the light layer of soft gray on the cover of the book. It had lain there for a bit, and it was his now. I reached around and took the book away from the other side. "Spider" descended into a paralaxcysm of indignation and hopped madly about this way and that for a moment. Then he settled down on the corner of the chessboard and stared at me for several minutes. He could see me sitting there about two feet from him. If I moved or shifted he would take tiny steps to keep his body and eyes aimed directly at me. This tiny aggrieved creature, one ten thousandth my size, was willing to take me on in the name of that lost part of his world. Spider psyches, I reflected, have much devoted to a sense of what's theirs and very little dedicated (or cross-wired) to adjudging relative sizes.

I was reminded of a similar incident a few months previous I had forgotten. Another jumping spider appeared on my bar of soap which lay in a casement window sill while I was taking a shower. I went to pick up the soap expecting this spider would hop off and return to what ever dark corner it came from. It did not and reared up on its back four legs and waved its front legs at me in a distinctly threatening fashion. I could see its little mouth parts moving. I took another bar of soap from the sink and left the spider to its own devices, marching back and forth across the edge of the soap. Presently as the air steamed up and all surfaces grew moister I could see a faint bit of lather build up around the spiders legs. Gradually, as the spider never stopped moving and reacting to my movements, this built up to a film that engulfed its whole body. I watched this and noted that air does not move through a soap film. If this spider needs air this will not play out well for it. At that point a notion of this sort must have come to the spider which began a number of hops straight up into the air, a little higher each time. These did nothing to dislodge the film from around its body. On the final hop it jumped clear of the bar of soap altogether and landed on its back with its legs extended in the air. I poked it with my finger. It was quite rigid and never moved again.

Sweepers Sweepers man your brooms...

NBC ran a show last Wednesday (17 April 02) a slice-of-life piece on the military. Particularly life aboard the Aircraft Carrier John C. Stennis CV 74. It seems to me every five to ten years somebody runs a piece like this - one of the networks, Frontline, Nova, somebody - and I usually watch it. I watch because I lived on one of those things once. It was home for the better part of a year. This time around: though I found it hard to watch. I was surprised by the discomfort I felt and the difficulty I had giving myself to the show. Too many things had changed. Too many things were being remembered, rather than reinforced or causally recollected. It has been a long time, and my life on the ship belongs to a past era by any way of reckoning.
My ship was the USS Ranger. It's being cut up now I believe. Built in 1954 it didnÕt even make it to its fiftieth birthday. The Forrestals' are gone, all of them: Forrestal, Saratoga, Ranger, and Independence. The Stennis is not only some twenty percent bigger with more planes and more bombs, but all the fuels tanks of the nuclear-powered Stennis carry jet-fuel. Oil-burners such as the Ranger could spare the jets less than half it's fuel tanks. In truth the Stennis is probably twice the ship the Forrestals were. I remember seeing four Carriers in a row at North Island (San Diego) once, all veterans of the Vietnam war and past at least one refit. They all looked equally enormous from were I stood. I couldnÕt conceive of anything bigger. Now tin shears and acetylene torches eat away the real matter of a memory.

The way people live aboard those things has changed too. Not so much that all recognition is gone; Everyone still seems to sleep in "Northampton Racks." This is a foot locker with a mattress on the lid, some curtains and a small fluorescent light, stacked three or four high. They are the only space on a ship that is truly yours. There is still the One-MC, the Shipwide intercom. Still, the cycle of bells, one through eight four times a day. There is still setting the ships material condition at dusk. Still Alert 15's, Firepartys etc. Naval vessels impose themselves on their inhabitants thoroughly, without apology and the template varies only slowly. Brokow stuck his head in the division which had been my old unit. The place was bulkhead to bulkhead PC's half of them connected to the internet. We had a water cooled Univac and a punch card loader to program it. A minor difference. Women; though, there were no women on the Ranger. Not while underway at least. Four week, six week, at sea periods, no women. We checked, we asked-specifically, they answered, they said no, apparently there were rules. Those rules have changed. This difference was the hardest to get a feel for. The tremendous artifiality of living and working without women around was never lost on us at the time. It marked the break and exceptionalness of military life for us. It underscored the age and weight of accumulated culture -subculture really. That weight came down upon us and molded us - I can only really speak for myself - to its imprint. Even then women were serving aboard the noncombatants. I remember, during an picnic outing for our task force to Grandee Island (a very lovely little island that sits in the entrance to Subic Bay in the Phillipines), watching some boys and girls together from our assigned oil tanker take hold of their Captain carry him down the beach and toss him in the surf. "This is so very different from the ship we serve on," I observed to my friend Mark (IS3 Edmunds), gesturing towards them with a bottle of San Miguel. "Yes," he replied nodding, "yes it is."

Writing!

Writing is generally the last thing I want to do. Its too introspective an undertaking and it takes up too much time, requires too much effort and focus. So I've been casting about for an approach and motivation that speaks to a point of order without a big penalty of energy. Because, after all, there is TV to watch, and hot dogs to microwave. Macaroni and cheese doesn't make itself. I find rambling pointlessly works for me- gets a lot on paper with hardly any cognitive damage at all. Motivation must be pried out of the embedded portions of the day. I was looking at a page in my local paper the other day (02 April). The "Kid's Post" it calls itself. Its the back page of the Washington Posts Style section. The topic of the day was kids and their pets. Some kids got to write little stories, and their pets got their photos in the paper. One youngster held onto her pet and so got herself in the picture. I could use a kid like that as my agent I thought. It's not as though I've ever had anything published in the Post. Sigh, I don't suppose I'd get a reduced rate being her uncle and all.

Writing.
I think it helps if you don't yourself too seriously. Maybe serious helps some folk, I don't know. It puts me in mind of that old Jon Lovitz sketch: ACTING! Writing! behold. Watch how its done. Look up, its the sky. Over there - the horizon. These could be, umm, metaphors, conceivably. Or how about this: blue. Note how suddenly you were put in mind of color maybe even color shaded blue. How is this done, you cry. The answer: writing. Now this. Green. Yes green. Mercy, its just like being in Fenway Park in June it is . By what means is the thing accomplished, you demand dumbfounded. Technology? A certain sympathetic magic? Ancient Ionian Mystery Ceremony? Mirrors perhaps? No not at all. Simply I. I alone. Twas writing is all, that spoke for the lot. Writing!

Hey is this thing still turned on?

Well perhaps a little more time has gone by since the last I wrote anything here than I would have liked. Can't trace all the things that might account for that. Wrong background music perhaps. Or an unhelpful habit of continually getting up on the wrong side of the bed. A crumb, unseen not understood, laying across the path larger than any new england glacial-strewn boulder. Only one part in ten broaching the surface; like an iceberg, or a camels nose under the tent flap. Still, a number of things have gotten written in draft or sketched out, at least, in simple text or bare bones edit.

These things were supposed to end up here, but elsewhere also. The elsewhere in question is an as yet nascent Web 'zine being put together by friends. Its intrinsic being tied to a Content Management System - also perched on the edge of being and not yet being. The CMS is to be a commerical product the sales from which will render money they will use to feed their darling innocent child. The 'zine in being will be a house project, a manafestation and a showcase of the CM system. With this in mind, I turned my attention from shorts asides (like this) to several article length notions. Deliberately leaving them unfinished until it was time for them to be on their way so I could send them off reletively fresh and not worked and reworked until there was little left but dry worried dust.

So I balanced these things upon my nose like a midget performing bear in the outer ring of a three ring circus and could think of no way of getting back to my own neglected web page, shabby in its static non dynamicness. (I could throw in some javascripting, you know, just for the heck of it.) When my Niece (age 9) recently mentioned that she could possibly supply me with a review of "Ice Age." I was shamed again into scribbling incomprehensible notes on little tiny pieces of paper. Which, jammed into various pockets, exist not so much as reminders of some point of inspiration as they do a mojo of sorts.

Something new

Replacing the nested tables with CSS elements, can't remember why I didn't do this before. musta been a reason.