posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

going to the mat

It’s difficult to write these days. Internal monologues are focused on figuring out how to pack up life asap. It’s a bit strange to say that the past four-plus years is the longest I’ve lived in one place continuously since leaving my parents home at 17 y.o. And further, it’s one of the few periods of time that I have had *all* my belongings in one place and (mostly) out of boxes. The majority of my adult life, my stuff has been in a storage unit somewhere—New Jersey, Prescott, Golden, Boulder—or in someone’s garage or so. Uff. Packing the entire archive back up seems absurd as it was hardly accessed in the time it was out of boxes. A useless pile of detritus. Why, why, why subject myself to the ignominy and energy-waste of maintaining something that I’m the only one who has an interest in it?

Now Reading: Absorbing the epic six-volume autobiography, Min Kamp, from Norwegian, Karl Ove Knausgård. At Zander’s recommendation, and then, once I started and realized that I actually was in the same locations at the same times—Bergen, Trondheim, Stavanger, Kristiansand, Oslo—as Karl Ove back when I was spending a fair amount of time in Norway in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A compelling read.

Knausgård, Karl Ove. My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love. Translated by Don Bartlett. 1st Archipelago books edition. Vol. 2. 6 vols. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 573.

I recently checked in with Julia, my former CGS intern. She’s a Mines (hydrogeology) graduate, who has, wonderfully, found a shared pathway to follow her bliss. She and her boyfriend, Torin, also a Mines alumni, have taken their connection with yoga to a higher level, gaining the necessary credentials for teaching and are planning to go international with that sooner than later. They have also started a YouTube channel—Wellbeing Cafe—already with a huge number of yoga routines and a variety of other material. Very cool to see this transition.

Somewhat disturbing to me, though, is that part of this personal evolution is almost forced to take place within the sphere of social media, especially YouTube, given the oligarchic control that it exerts on any and all users. That and the insertion of ads that cannot be cancelled or avoided—all of them utterly useless and annoying—until the channel receives a minimum number of subscribers (1,000). At that point the channel owners can at least select when the ad is played. Otherwise, one will show up in the middle of a yoga sequence or more often. I was stuck with one that played for ten minutes. Finding an independent pathway to socio-economic viability is challenging for their generation. They could have gone full-engineering and been working in a (potentially) stifling ‘regular’ job with deluxe cash flows. But they are cognizant of the lives of some of their cohort who are extremely unhappy (and unhealthy!), coasting along on that trajectory. Given the wider-scale complexity of what is ‘going on’ in late-stage Empire, best to work at basic life-skills like body-health, psycho-spiritual development, consumption habits, community-building, and look to develop trajectories that are beyond the reach of Empire (if that is possible in this new-ish multi-lateral oligarch-and-authoritarian-driven global power struggle).

Later, I juxtapose those assessments with the swirl of jagged thoughts and impressions that are filling my consciousness: monkey-brain on amphetamines, faugh. Complexity increasing, logarithmic, with age (of Self and Empire), while neuronal synapses are dulled, blank. Is this what life *is*, or what it becomes when attention is shredded by too much stuff? Packing boxes, why hold so tightly to this stuff when it will likely sit in those boxes for a long time. Possibly for the existing life-time! Having is a form of suffocation, burdened by excretions of other lives, but mostly my own. Giving is an exhalation, from the deep belly, giving inspiration to the cosmos.

Venus is high and brilliant in the evening, Saturn much less so in the sunset’s glare, Jupiter, Mars high with the waxing, near full Luna, invisible-but-present Uranus. I regularly take a late night stroll around the property before bed, no matter how cold. Waking the deer snoozing in the openness, their greenish-yellow headLight eyes blazing in my headlamp. First encounter, the eye pairs rise vertically, then, after staring, frozen, as the LED supernova waxes, they bolt to the tree line or across the street to a neighbor’s yard. Occasionally, a tinier pair of eyes, one of several feral cats that are encountered, or, rarely, a fox or skunk. So far no encounters with the large carnivores that do frequent the area: bears and mountain lions. Much of the walk is without the headlamp on, and aside from the always-on brightest-Light-within-several-miles that my neighbor installed a year ago, it’s dark with the brilliant streak of the Milky Way in all its offset-rotational glory.

A 30-minute call with George, I feel rusty, awkward and jumbled. He and I never developed an audio tele-presence connection, given the logistics and expense back when. Our connection was forged across some immersive instances of intense f-2-f interaction. After those formative encounters at Mines and in Santa Monica in the early 1980s, and aside from one more f-2-f in 1989, it’s always been text. Hand-written or typed letters through the post, then email, and these days, texting. I wonder if we will ever cross physical paths again in this incarnation. Doubtful, especially when I remove myself from this nation, and head for another, though there are no guarantees of anything anywhere anymore.

posted
  • place: Dresden, Germany

July 1944

14 September 1944, Thursday afternoon: In the evening, without having heard or read the reports herself, Eva came home with the [contents of] the latest bulletins: In the German military bulletin: English attack on Aachen; in the English one: in the course of the attack on Trier, the German frontier crossed on a 22-mile front. A new offensive is also said to be under way in the East. — The fact that the enemy is on German soil will make a tremendous impression. … In the cellar, Neumark had an old copy of the DAZ, which he had found by chance and which included a page summarizing the events of 1943.

In February 1943, the fall of Stalingrad; in the spring, the Führer holds discussions with the King of Bulgaria, with Antonescu—Count Ciano is appointed Italian ambassador to the Vatican… What an impression it all made on us! Ciano shot, Bulgaria and Romania changing sides, Stalingrad as remote as a fairy tale… But something else made a greater impression on us—it was the same for both Neumark and myself: the impotence of memory to fix all that we had so painfully experienced in time.

When—insofar as we remembered it at all—had this or that happened, when had it been? Only a few facts stick in the mind, dates not at all. One is overwhelmed by the present, time is not divided up, everything is infinitely long ago, everything is infinitely long in coming; there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, only an eternity. And that is yet another reason one knows nothing of the history one has experienced: The sense of time has been abolished; one is at once too blunted and too overexcited, one is crammed full of the present. The chain of disappointments also unfolded in front of me again.

[…] Ever since Stalingrad, since the beginning of ’43 therefore, I have been waiting for the end. I remember asking Eva at the time: Do you think it is a defeat, or do you consider it to be the defeat, the catastrophe? That was in February ’43. Then I had not yet done any factory duty. After that, I was a factory slave for fourteen months. And now it is almost three months since I was released, three months in which I find it ever more difficult to wrest useful work from my so-called free days.

Klemperer, Victor. To the Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1942–1945. 1st ed. Vol. 2. 3 vols. New York, NY: Random House, 1999.
posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

Diaries – Klemperer

Klemperer, Victor. To the Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1942–1945. 1st ed. Vol. 2. 3 vols. New York, NY: Random House, 1999.

One hundred pages in, now into the fall of 1942 as, unbeknownst to Klemperer directly at the time, the “Final Solution” is being implemented by the Nazis. Hearsay begins to accumulate. Klemperer’s microscopic view, no, his immersion in life as a Jew married to an “Aryan”—a ‘special’ case in the Nazi hierarchy of depravity—is at once thoroughly banal as a daily journal while riveting as an unmasking of Arendt’s “banality of evil.” The horrifying details of the increasingly oppressive restrictions accumulate incrementally within a framework of conflicting logics each day, while random visits from the Gestapo destroy any vestiges of normality as the wider German population seems largely clueless by choice.

A partial list derived from the book encompassing some of the punitive laws and conditions in place by the early summer of 1942:

  • Mandatory Identification: Jews were required to wear the yellow Star of David visibly on their clothing. It could not be pinned on, it had to be sewn on a heavy outer coat, making the wearing of it even more unbearable in the summer.

  • Travel Restrictions: Jews were prohibited from owning cars or bicycles, and they faced severe restrictions on public transport usage. Travel between cities required special permission.

  • Property Confiscation: Jews were stripped of personal property, including homes, furniture, and valuables, which were often confiscated or forcibly sold at low prices.

  • Housing Restrictions: Jews were forced into overcrowded “Jewish houses” (Judenhäuser) and forbidden from renting or owning other properties.

  • Employment Bans: Jews were excluded from most professions and could only work in jobs deemed acceptable by the regime, typically low-wage manual labor.

  • Food and Shopping Restrictions: Access to groceries was limited, with Jews only allowed to shop during restricted hours, often when stores were nearly empty.

  • Education Prohibitions: Jewish children were barred from attending public schools, and higher education was entirely closed off to Jews.

  • Social Isolation: Jews were banned from many public spaces, including parks, theaters, cinemas, and libraries.

  • Medical Access: Jews could not visit non-Jewish doctors or hospitals and were denied most medical care except from a few Jewish professionals.

  • Curfews and Movement Limits: Jews were subjected to curfews and confined to specific areas.

  • Marriage and Relationships: Marriages between Jews and non-Jews were outlawed, and existing mixed marriages faced intense scrutiny and pressure.

  • Cultural Erasure: Jews were barred from owning radios, telephones, and typewriters, further isolating them from the broader world.

  • Confiscation of Pets: Jews were forbidden from owning pets, and any existing ones were often confiscated or destroyed.

  • Bank Account Monitoring: Jewish bank accounts were closely monitored, with savings often seized.

  • Deportations: The ultimate restriction was the ongoing deportation of Jews to ghettos, concentration camps, and extermination camps.

These measures, constantly being ramped up, aimed to dehumanize, isolate, and impoverish Jews, stripping them of their rights and dignity as part of the Nazi regime’s genocidal agenda. The diaries provide an invaluable firsthand account of the escalating persecution during this period. And, obliquely, how the wider population either participated in the process or remained purposely ignorant.

I will probably suspend reading this volume in the stead of first understanding the more insidious evolution he documents in the first volume where the initial Nazi take-over of Germany proceeds:

Klemperer, Victor. I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1933–41,. Vol. 1. 3 vols. Westminster: Random House Publishing Group, 2016.
posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

now reading

Statistic: Voter turnout of national parliamentary elections in Sweden from 1970 to 2022

Statistic: Turnout rates among the voting-eligible population in United States presidential and midterm elections from 1789 to 2020

Barkow, Jerome H., Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. [2nd. ed.], 1st issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, cop. 1992. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Cornaro, Luigi. Sure and Certain Methods of Attaining a Long and Healthful Life. London, UK: Daniel Midwinter, 1722.

Mattern, Shannon. “The Big Data of Ice, Rocks, Soils, and Sediments.” Places Journal, no. 2017 (November 7, 2017). https://placesjournal.org/article/the-big-data-of-ice-rocks-soils-and-sediments. (And several other extremely interesting articles and papers by Dr. Shannon on her site: https://wordsinspace.net/publications/)

posted
  • place: Colorado

an aside and the Colorado Groundwater Atlas

[Ed: As the coauthor who developed the structure and presentation of this first-ever fully online publication at the CGS—the Colorado Groundwater Atlas—I wanted to help draw attention to the issue of groundwater generally. This is an edited version of the initial RockTalk blog post when the Atlas was first published in 2020. Written for both the general public (Sections 1-8 and 13) and a technical audience (Sections 9-12), the Atlas is an excellent primer on this critical and rapidly diminishing resource.]

An aside

My neighbor, Christie, directed my attention the The Last Word On Nothing (LWON) blog—she writes for it—and I’ve been reading it regularly over the past couple years. That led to my belated discovery of the work of Colorado-based  author Craig Childs who also writes for LWON. He’s “an anecdotal science writer, citizen naturalist, an eye in wild places.” I’m currently absorbing and enjoying his first book of essays, “The Secret Knowledge of Water,” published in 2000, a series of intimate takes on this elemental feature of western landscapes. (Well, technically, “Stone Desert Journal,” published in 1999, and republished in 2022, was his first book.)

Water in the US West is a big deal … I should probably assemble a bibliography of essential readings on the topic! Maybe someday. Meanwhile, I’ve got to go water some of the few native trees on my property with captured rainwater that came last night, it’s been a pretty dry year again, so far.

 

The mighty Colorado River starts out as a seep from a wetland at its headwaters, La Poudre Pass, Rocky Mountain National Park. Wetlands are important carriers of near-surface groundwater. Photo credit: David Noe for the CGS.
The mighty Colorado River starts out as a seep from a wetland at its headwaters, La Poudre Pass, Rocky Mountain National Park. Wetlands are important carriers of near-surface groundwater. Photo credit: David Noe.
Groundwater

Everyone knows that water, wherever it might be found—at the surface or underground—is essential for life. However, few people are aware that groundwater is everywhere beneath their feet. It fills the pore spaces between grains of soil, sand, and gravel as well as the fractures and voids in hard bedrock (Figure 02-01 – pdf download). It may be just below the surface—accessible by digging with simple garden tools, or it may be hundreds of feet down in hard rock—requiring expensive drilling with specialized equipment.

more “an aside and the Colorado Groundwater Atlas”
posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

Six Memos – Calvino

Indeed my writing has always found itself facing two divergent roads that correspond to two kinds of knowledge: one that moves through mental spaces of disembodied rationality, in which lines can be drawn that connect points, projections, abstract shapes, vectors of force; another that moves in a space crowded with objects and seeks to create a verbal equivalent of that space by filling pages with words, in a meticulous effort to match the written to the not-written, to the sum of the sayable and the not-sayable. These are two distinct drives toward exactitude that will never reach absolute fulfillment: the first because natural languages always say something more than formalized languages – they always carry a certain amount of noise that alters the essence of the information; and the second because in trying to account for the density and continuity of the world around us, language is exposed as lacunose, fragmentary: it always says something less than the sum of what can be experienced.

Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1985–86. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
posted
  • place: Mint Wash, Prescott, Arizona

naming

Hyla arenicolor, Mint Wash, Williamson Valley, Arizona, April 2005

“What is it?” we ask, meaning what is its name? This odd quirk of the human mind: Unless we can name things, they remain for us only half-real. Or less than half-real: nonexistent. A person without a name is nobody. A human’s name can become more important than his person. A plant, an animal, a thing without a name is no thing — nothing. No wonder we humans like to think that in the beginning was — the Word. What word? Any word. Any word at all, anything rather than the silence and terror of the nameless.” —

Abbey, Edward. Abbey’s Road. New York, NY: Plume, 1991.

Plowing (ploughing) through Abbey this time, years since reading “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” his writing seems dated, depressing, even dark. So much of the landscape that he passed through is (de)evolved, so much of what he prognosticated about the Southwest, at the hands of corrupt politicians and developers has materialized like a cancer across the land. The forever-expansion, development-is-good, it-creates-jobs mantra that is chanted by deeply unholy men (and women). Bringing 4000+ square-foot pseudo-adobe MacMansions to dot the landscape along with scaled-up vehicular afterbirth: Hummers in every five-car garage. Although there are places one might go and on a middle-scale—meaning the easily visible—local scale, to the uninitiated eye, the natural system seems untouched. But with any consideration of scientific data—atmospheric systems, plant and animal ecosystems, and hydrological systems are being irretrievably altered. What of the domination of a species that will destroy most of the other macro-species only to live on briefly in an impoverished environment: soon to succumb to a viral celebration in the host of hosts. Definitely, catch it while you can. Take the last road trips around before gas costs what it should and the only way to get out of Dodge will be on foot. And the only way to survive the plague is through a slow and costly counter-evolution.

At any rate, this is a frog (possibly a Canyon Tree frog – Hyla arenicolor). But note the incredible coloration. The green exactly matches a particular lichen that grows on the granite in that area. The pinkish blush of the oxidized feldspar in the granite. There were four of them literally stuck to the side of a large smooth boulder on Mint Wash. I was sitting opposite from them, having lunch with Marianne, about 6 feet (2 meters) away, and at first I thought they were phenocrysts in the granite, but then saw they were frogs. This particular one was the only one I could get close enough to make an image of, it was crouched on a relatively reasonable ridge. The other three were glued to vertical (overhanging!) smooth surfaces, but there was a 2-meter deep hole in the creek bed, full of water immediately below them. So, this one had to do. The beautiful beast is about 1.5 inches (3 cm) long.

posted
  • place: Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington and South Acton, Massachusetts

Wednesday, 27 March, 1963

Worked up travel voucher. Looks like I owe L2 $152.62. Not bad, since I bought clothes & photo gear.

Overcast

Read Keene’s booklet on “Stargazing with Telescope & Camera.” It looks quite good. I’m trying to get all the info needed to permit me to make good photos of the sun on 20 July 1963 at 4:44 PM on Cadillac Mountain, where it will last just under a minutes. I’d like to use 2 – 35mm, the Bolex and the 4×5.

Picked up 3 USGS maps of Maine — Skowhegan, Pittsfield, & Stetson. Looks like I need Kingsbury & Guilford also.

posted

episodic memory

Our capacity to remember episodes in our lives provides a profound and highly valued aspect to our existence, allowing us the capacity to relive events in our lives. We value the ability to relive a proud moment such as a graduation or the birth of a child. We expect and in many cases require that we will remember a meeting with a coworker or a visit to a family member. We start to question our mental capacities if we forget an episode, and we question the capabilities of others if they forget an episode that we remember. Thus, the memory for episodes is an essential component of human behavior.

Hasselmo, M.E., 2012. How We Remember: Brain Mechanisms of Episodic Memory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wewsh, high density, clinical neuro-physiology/biology or so. But the typological divisions of memory among episodic, procedural, and semantic seem an approach that reveals how we are. And the neural construction of spatio-temporal trajectory (episodic trajectory) is fascinating. Overall, it feels like the science is still in the process of sub-dividing ever more the energetic processes of be-ing.

posted

A Matter of Scale

An ultimately readable and thought-provoking book by one Kenneth Farnish available online for free (at the Internet Archive) that examines where we are, how we got here, and what may lie ahead.

Yes, you are part of the system; but you are far more important than the people higher up in the web: you are the engine, the energy source, the reason for its continuation. You are the system. Without your cooperation, without your faith, the system would have no energy and then it would cease to exist.

I don’t know about you, but that makes me feel good.

In so many words, a chunk of my dissertation makes the same point — the embeddedness of our be-ing here, now. Farnish just makes it all extremely readable as a journalist should. I happened to make it darker, and definitely more dense. oh well.

Farnish, Kenneth. A Matter of Scale, 2011. https://archive.org/details/AMatterOfScale.
posted

not to be overlooked . . .

Following on to examine the trend in cosmology and unified field theories, Chalmers speculates that conscious experience may be a fundamental feature cosmologically:

“If the existence of consciousness cannot be derived from physical laws, a theory of physics is not a true theory of everything. So a final theory must contain an additional fundamental component. Toward this end, I propose that conscious experience be considered a fundamental feature, irreducible to anything more basic.”

This perception of the central nature of consciousness to the cosmological description is more acute than an academic or philosophical matter. Although the scientific description is based exclusively on the objective physical universe, our contact with reality is entirely sine qua non through our subjective conscious experience. From birth to death, we experience only a stream of consciousness through which all our experience of the physical world is gained. All scientific experiments performed on the physical world ultimately become validated by the subjective conscious experience of the experimenters, and the subsequent witnesses to the phenomena and conclusions. — Chris King

King, C., 2006. Quantum Cosmology and the Hard Problem of the Conscious Brain. In J. Tuszynski, ed. The Emerging Physics of Consciousness. New York, NY: Springer.
posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

The Big Roads

Swift, Earl. The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.
posted

Wanderlust

I kept coming back to this route for respite from my work, and for my work too, because thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals. — Rebecca Solnit

Solnit, Rebecca (2000). Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin Books.

It’s hard to brightly imagine that when we decide to retreat to the desert or to the mountains to walk, it is a process deeply colored and, literally, in/de-formed by relatively recent cultural contingency.

The retreat is steeped in a socially constructed reality that began to emerge around William Wordsworth and J. J. Rousseau’s time and was sparked, in part, by their actual perambulations and especially the writings that welled-up whilst they were on the road (The Excursion, by Wordsworth, for example, and Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker).

But in a completely different sense, walking (and be-ing while walking) is ahistoric. Because the present moment is never to be repeated, nor is a life-time to happen twice, the momentary events of that particular movement are unique, and uniquely inspiring. Embodied movement is a passage through the flux of difference, regardless of the pathway. And although I cannot anymore go to the delicious extremes of span and height and endurance that so many others have done and will do, it is not extremity that brings the timeless essence of movement. When all is change, the senses are taught to discern the minute difference of the everyday, ever more. In this, the near becomes just as exotic and inspiring as the far and less reachable places.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Food, Energy, and Society

For most of the time that humans have inhabited the earth, their prime source of power has been their own muscle power. …

Early additional sources of power included human slaves and domesticated animals. The hunting/gathering societies were helped when an extra food gatherer or hunter could join in the task of securing food. Likewise, the labor intensiveness of primitive agriculture increased both the need for and the usefulness of slave and animal labor. …

A slave or extra hunter, of course, would have to be fed. However, two hunters could kill more than twice as much game as a single hunter could kill alone. In this way, additional labor provided a greater return in energy than the energy input required for its maintenance. (p. 68)

Food, Energy, and Society, Pimentel, D., Pimentel, M., Third Edition, Taylor And Francis Group, Boca Raton, Florida, 2008. Food, Energy and Society, [Pimentel, D., Pimentel, M., (revised edition), University Press of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, 1996]

I haven’t gotten access to the most current (2008) edition of this major collation of numbers, but the 1996 version is recent enough for the extrapolation process to be framed and the principles to be clearly demonstrated. Unfortunately that extrapolation reveals a worsening situation than they originally laid out (or imagined!) in 1979. With a detailed quantitative analysis of the (energy) costs of all eras and types of food production, as well as an examination of pesticide use, water, biodiversity, and soil resource issues, the separate chapters are full of numbers and comparisons which are remarkable in extent and sobering in their basic message. It would be possible to verify the extensive research in detail by tracking down the fifty-pages of references, but the message is simple: the human species is exerting an ever-increasing energy drain on the global environment merely to subsist, and there are definitely better and worse ways to marginally affect the situation. Humans tend to be wasteful — but any life-form causes this process of entropic waste (energy) production merely by living — it is not an avoidable condition. It appears now that the problems are of such a wide-scale, and the solutions are presently so haphazard (as applied by nation-states rather than through some trans-national instrument), that the inevitable upward geometric curves (population, resource consumption, environmental degradation, etc) will reach their limit. Those curves as they exist in the mathematical domain have no real upward limit and may approach infinity asymptotically. This would represent the system with infinite energy reserves. The earth, taken as a sub-system of the cosmos, is finite, and so are the energy resources it makes available for human use. more “Food, Energy, and Society”

posted
  • place: Düsternbrooke, Kiel, Germany

African Feedback

Through a process of listening and speaking, African Feedback documents an exchange between artist Alessandro Bosetti and residents of villages throughout West Africa. Playing music by various experimental and avant-garde composers to people met in villages, Bosetti records their responses, asking them what they are hearing, and how they relate to the music and sounds. Composing their responses, with field recordings made throughout his travels, African Feedback is a musical portrait of cultural translations, misunderstandings, different voices and languages. Including an audio CD and the transcriptions of the listening sessions, along with an introduction by the artist, African Feedback is a beautiful and beguiling work cutting across the ongoing questions of cultural difference.

Alessandro Bosetti was born in Milan, Italy in 1973. He is a composer and sound artist working on the musicality of spoken words and unusual aspects of spoken communication, producing text-sound compositions featured in live performances, radio broadcasts and published recordings. In his work he moves across the line between sound anthropology and composition, often including translation and misunderstanding in the creative process. Field research and interviews build the basis for abstract compositions, along with electro-acoustic and acoustic collages, relational strategies, trained and untrained instrumental practices, vocal explorations and digital manipulations.

and the Dworak’s are off to Brussels for the weekend for Milena’s daughter Karla’s baptism.

posted
  • place: Bremen, Germany

meta/data

in the midst of Frieder’s piles of books and papers to-be-dealt-with (meticulously organized, to be sure), is a copy of Mark’s new book on MIT Press, meta/data. a remix auto-biography of his last 15 years or so.

comparing/contrasting to my own traces is a strange flux of feelings. where practice is sampled (how, what, and into what form) and translated (re-mediated) into another form. it is only the form of the mediation that determines the relative fed-back social efficacy of the individual (or social sustainability of the individual’s praxis). the books points to, alludes to, hints at, expands upon, posits, and invents a praxis, part of which is the reflexive re-creation of a praxis. but does it engage in an authentic praxis that is not about pragmatism and social role-playing?

it is clear that it is the choice of propagation channels that ultimately determines how the Self is or is not rewarded by the larger social system. it is also clear that these choices will also have a profound affect on the human relationships that ensue.

how to select those forms? Mark’s book and documented practice seems optimized, pragmatic, and formal (that is, formed to optimally integrate into an existing social reward system). the question of form returns again and again. along with the embedded-ness within a social system that has strictly limited pathways for reward and punishment.

I understand the principle, but choose to engage in the praxis which supersedes the documentation of the praxis. although I continue to write, make images, sound and video works, and so on — none of which garner any attention whatsoever.

the presence of the personal network of a handful of deep supporters is the only plus to the path of the praxis. otherwise, might as well be living on the streets. or simply finished off with the whole thing.

posted
  • place: Sydney, NSW, Australia

despair? or what?

interview passes smoothly, no need for the pre-tension of notes. great pressure to articulate in brief the complex topics of life-practices. the results will be known in a week already. fast and efficient compared to the debacle of the other recent US university interaction. it will be a tough choice if there is an affirmative. there is a deeply-felt distance from everything I know in the world, being here. settling into yet another life here. finding a place. Sydney is urban, though with a slick easiness of calm inner relaxation. huh? words can’t circumscribe it yet. at all. haven’t made any photographs yet either. a few audio samples, but nothing definitive. walking home after sunset, the skyline of downtown is silhouetted against a singularly sharp sky.

Life is impossible at high temperatures. That’s why I have reached the conclusion that anguished people, whose inner dynamism is so intense that it reaches paroxysm, and who cannot accept normal temperatures, are doomed to fall. The destruction of those who live unusual lives is an aspect of life’s demonism, but it is also an aspect of its insufficiency, which explains why life is the privilege of mediocre people. Only mediocrities live at life’s normal temperature; the others are consumed at temperatures at which life cannot endure, at which they can barely breathe, already one foot beyond life. — E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair style=

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

now that’s news!

Chris mentioned that old CSM amigo George Saunders just had a MacArthur Fellowship bestowed on hissef. well, dang, George, congrats! I had to chuckle when I went to his fan site and saw it had been hacked by a Turkish Armenian freedom fighter — complete with a waving flag and anthem. it’s back up now…

George’s latest short story collection, In Persuasion Nation gets qualified critical acclaim as is likely with a collection of stories. I haven’t read it yet. I’m waiting for a 600+ page novel to wield baseball-bat-to-torso, outlining in bruised flesh the practice, not of resistance to the contemporary cultural brutality, but of a thoughtlessly new way-of-going. potential’s there, but somehow mundaneity clogs the sweat pores. put a hold at the local library on Nation, review forthcoming.

Following his superb story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline style= (1996) and Pastoralia style= (1999), as well as last year’s novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, Saunders reaffirms his sharp, surreal vision of contemporary, media-saturated life, but keeps most of the elements within his familiar bandwidth. In the sweetly acerbic “My Flamboyant Grandson,” a family trip through Times Square is overwhelmed by pop-up advertisements. In “Jon,” orphans get sold to a market research firm and become famous as “Tastemakers & Trendsetters” (complete with trading cards). “CommComm” concerns an air force PR flunky living with the restless souls of his parents while covering for a spiraling crisis at work. The more conventionally grounded stories are the most compelling: one lingers over a bad Christmas among Chicago working stiffs, another follows a pair of old Russian-Jewish women haunted by memories of persecution. Others collapse under the weight of too much wit (the title story especially), and a few are little more than exercises in patience (“93990,” “My Amendment”). But Saunders’ vital theme — the persistence of humanity in a vacuous, nefarious marketing culture of its own creation — comes through with subtlety and fresh turns. — Publishers Weekly

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  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

angels speak

Look Homeward, Angel burns a swath through my horizontal days, speaking, drilling truth-of-being in an elemental and fearful way through reading eyes into soul. mmmmm. nice to adsorb this re-presentation that speaks so in dissonant harmony.

O God! O God! We have been in exile in another land and a stranger in our own. The mountains were our masters: they went home to our eye and our heart before we came to five. Whatever we can do or say must be forever hillbound. Our senses have been fed by our terrific land; our blood has learned to run to the imperial pulse of America which, leaving, we can never lose and never forget. We walked along a road in Cumberland, and stooped, because the sky hung down so low; and when we ran away from London, we went by little rivers in a land just big enough. And nowhere that we went was far: the earth and the sky were close and near. And the old hunger returned — the terrible and obscure hunger that haunts and hurts Americans, and that makes us exiles at home and strangers wherever we go. — Thomas Wolfe

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  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

paint-by-number

Finally got around to reading The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, an overview of the New Physics. It’s somewhat dated, but still carries a nice historical narrative with observations on the uncertainty of the whole thing that is being dealt with. Watching a video (produced in Japan), on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Speaking with the Dalai Lama and others. All of whom were dying. Phone call from Nick, catching up. Possible travel plans to Missouri. Also talked to Greg, possible travel to Seattle and BC or Moab. Proposals off to NIFCA for a curators position, and waiting on the doctoral proposal. Reading more than I have in the last years, on average: wider, and deeper, note-taking, resonating with stylistic text forms across academia, science, philosophy, technology, engineering, and esoterica. But unemployed at the same time. Dog-sitting, using the riding-mower to cut some of the lawn; joined the YMCA since the college pool is closed now. Getting used to a different regimen. Lifting in the cybex room. Sore today. Getting my sunglasses replaced finally, ebay for a pair of artcraft round gold frames since they no longer make them. Gotta call Kate at IBM to see about her open source connection. What else? Weeding, and many emails to Europe for a fall tour. And the need to get back out to the desert on the moonless nights.

paint-by-number. Reminds me of summers at Aunt Mary’s house, she loved doing paint-by-number kits. Now she is an decent painter, starting to free-style after retiring to Florida.

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  • place: Rösrath, Germany

Book of the Hopi – Waters

parallel to everything else, a close read of “Book of the Hopi” by Frank Waters, along with Truth of a Hopi prepares me for the return to Arizona. springtime and rioting wild flowers. need to get to some petroglyphs to read some located media. with a sonic environment generated from nasa tv, Alan Watts, and raudio @ park.nl, along with helicopters flying over.

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

batholithic exfoliation

reading “Basin and Range” by John McPhee again, and being out in some fine places just a mile from the house. Mint Wash, full of crystal clear water running through the granodioritic roots of a massive batholith.

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

moving on

finally broke down and bought a copy of Geert’s book and was pleased with his working of the New Media Education chapter. trying to ready new material for the Overgaden Sound Festival which I am co-curating with Björn, though I haven’t been too busy. at least with that, more, all the other things coming up in the immediate future — RAM6 in Vilnius, the residency in Akureyri, the Matchmaking Festival workshop in Trondheim, several video festivals to submit the new dvd to, logistics, spring schedules beginning to be made, taxes to be finished, some texts to write, and all the other stuff that is always hanging there, like this web space. as it creeps toward its ten-year anniversary.

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

chess

reading IEEE Spectrum, NSPE, Science, and all that stuff. The old Encyclopedia Britannica, playing chess with Loki using the old Japanese ivory chess set. Finally he beats me. twice. I made him work for it, but he came through with not too much complaining. and ends up beating me all the time thereafter. monsoon season maybe did start up today. actually got wet, but it evaporated within an hour. the respite from sun was welcome, clouds are okay, too, nights warmer for the insulating effect, but highs are lowering. mountain biking today, and swimming, that’s good. necessary. gotta do a longer ride tomorrow.

the “P” on the side of the mountain south of town has been changed from all white(wash) to stripes of red, white, and blue. this area of Arizona has many veterans who started migrating to the area following World War 1, seeking a dry climate for health reasons. the Veterans Administration established a hospital in Prescott on the site of Fort Whipple, an early outpost for US military control of the native American ‘situation’ in the region. the Yavapai Indian Reservation abuts the Fort, and extends in a rhombohedral shape that sticks into the middle of the east side of town. between that and the “World’s Oldest Rodeo,” it’s cowboys and indians here.

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  • place: Boulder, Colorado

The Spell of the Sensuous

No thing has changed. All conditions change. Tired of language. Stopping to consume from the archive. The database that, if I did not have, in its massively material form, would free me to live in the moment. Digitizing is no answer because that process does not remove the weight of that past. Only complete transformation (by fire) would accomplish that. Burnt offering to the present, to living presence. If a practice was subsequently developed.

Approaching the limb of the eighth year of this journal/travelog. Meanwhile reading, or rather adsorbing, David Abram’s book “The Spell of the Sensuous”—recommended by a mutual friend, Eric Fisher, a friend of the author—which confirms obliquely several crucial practices that I had not yet been able to firmly frame in my worldview. Pleasing and stimulating. But reasons for characterizing drift into stretches where only poetics are meaningless for navigation of the now. Discrete, concrete, miscreant. Mechanical words, stripped of any life leave traces that mar what is left behind the wave of hand, brush of hair, shadow of hand on the back of the head. What is the be-ing-ness of Light?

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 2017.
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  • place: Boulder, Colorado

shop-rite on

portrait, bluegrass band at the Shoprite, Newton, New Jersey, December 1991

Flying times. Didgeridoo player at Whole Foods, in the aromatherapy aisle. Reminds me of the pseudo-bluegrass band playing at the Pharmacy in the Newton, New Jersey ShopRite. Something about Nero and Rome burning. Here in Boulder, however, it’s different. Food samples being offered everywhere, so people come to the store to get a meal. Word gets around. Even Boulder can’t insulate itself by the diffident cloak of liberal ‘caring’. Society out of touch. Schisms, chasms opening wide. John Brunner’s book The Sheep Look Up crosses my path again in Bordesholm, after 25 years. And it is more accurate, with the exception of missing the cyber-developments (those the Neuromancer caught), in its prognostications of a world ruled and consequently destroyed by technocrats and technological implementations in the service of consumers and consuming. So it goes. A traveler’s notes might well continue here in this immobile condition. As the social matrix around is foreign, and re-mark-able. And in the complex sliding process of multi-phased decay and degeneration. I had forgotten that much of the action in Brunner’s book takes place in Colorado, for whatever reasons. Ending with Denver under martial law, and the dominoes toppling.

Brunner, John. The Sheep Look Up. 1st BenBella Books ed. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2003.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Ace trade ed. Ace Science Fiction. New York, NY: Ace Books, 2000.

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

JC and crew

contact with Campbell! at least 15 years later, friendships are strong measures of sympathetic energies. great to meet the whole family. Jake, Lily, and Helen. on a short stop in their epic voyage from more than a thousand miles south of the border back to Vancouver and Hornby Island in British Colombia where they have laboriously constructed a true home over the last years. Lily leaves me with a beautiful and generous gift she made in Mexico — a little painting of angels.

and in between reflections on this, I began reading Paolo Friere again (found it in my text-collection here at the folks’ house). Loki and MB leave tomorrow for NYC and then Iceland, I will follow in a week or so, Nancy and Casey come south from SF on Friday, and I have to work on the RV that Jim and Janet loaned us as we had an unfortunate encounter with a deer on the way through the Mojave over the weekend.

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  • place: Lebanon, Pennsylvania

riding with the Prose Edda

the first full day in Amurika with Loki, here at Ellen, Gary, and Sarah’s house in central Pennsylvania. flying in yesterday, a delayed flight, a lost mind. and where am I? intensive thunderstorm hit on the drive north from the airport last night. Loki stays awake the whole drive, theorizing on poetic descriptions of thunder and Lightning Beings. the Edda jumped out at me before we left the airport in Keflavík, why not?