I lie about email.

I don’t mean I lie, IN email, although I probably do that, too. But I lie about email ALL the time.

Mostly I tell people I don’t have any. This is believable because I’m enough of an odd duck that such Luddite tendencies wouldn’t surprise anyone. On such occasions as I am forced to confess that I do have it, I do so grudgingly.

What is it about email that makes it such a miserable medium of communication?

Well, for one thing, it’s somewhat unreliable. People think of it as instantaneous, and it’s not. Sometimes I get time-sensitive materials on time, and sometimes they sit in the electronic pouch of a server on some form of multi-day digital bender. There’s no redress with this, either. Nothing is more corporate and indifferent than the dis-corporate “net”.

Second to that is it’s too darn free. It used to be that the only people laboring to send me multiple pages of their paranoid fantasies had computer skills. Now anyone can point, click, and send reams of urban legends, off color jokes and links to political commentary. If Gutenberg had foreseen Jacqueline Suzanne, he’d have melted movable type into some nice spoons. Similarly with the “free flow of information” on the internet.

Third, it’s a horribly passive-aggressive way to communicate. Once you have set your little boat adrift, whether anyone got your communication is their lookout. People, in my experience, routinely change the dates and locations of meetings, assign tasks, and call for funds in a method that is similar to leaving a note tucked under a certain rock. If that didn’t work when every member of the Spy club was living for the moment when they’d discover a new note under the rock, why would it work now?

This brings me to another thing I lie about when I talk about email. This lie may be less a lie than an inability to tell the whole truth. And the statement is, “I don’t get to my email.”

Now, truth is, sometimes I watch my email like a skinny cat a large mouse-hole. Sometimes I check it frequently. And SOMETIMES, the weather’s nice and I just don’t. Or I’m out of town. Or the server has hiccups. Or I’m newly in love.

I find there are generally more reasons not to look at email than to look at it.

This has no effect on the emailing demons on my list, however. Any brief pause in my attention to my inbox results in many pages of ipse dixit communications of greater and lesser importance, notice of arts events, invitations to fundraisers, forwards with animations, and the general detritus of assaults on my schedule. Also, as I’ve mentioned, changes in things I’ve already planned.

I sift through this with more or less patience, looking for direct communication.

In essence, email exacerbates the difficulties of any human relations. It makes clear that most of what we flatter ourselves is “communication” involves far more talking than listening. It reinforces our sense of injury that we are not the center of all universes. It magnifies our credulity. It enables us to gossip with fewer immediate consequences. And it gives us another mask to cover our authentic selves.

It’s a choice, of course. Email could be an ennobling way of making sure that the people you love know it. Maybe we could make that a holiday, a sort of electronic Rosh Hashanah, when we spoke no ill in email, neither gossiped, nor played pranks with blind carbon copying, nor larded up people’s days with indirect or self-centered messages.

I’d open all my mail on THAT day. And we’d be well written and sealed.

Video clips and Yeats

Recently a quondam “news organization” filmed some child abuse for our entertainment. Now, what’s up with that?

I understand, that when you’re filming in, say, Baghdad, you’re under military supervision, and not free to rush out with a pocketful of band aids at the site of a roadside bombing. But I do NOT understand how you can look at tape of people beating minors and then just edit it to commercial cut length and run teasers for it during the dinner hour. This isn’t an expose of the Klan. This runs with interviews of movie stars about their birthing notions. This is taking the problems of an ordinary family and making it into telegenic gladiatorial combat. Is that education? Is it news? Or is it pandering to our voyeuristic devils?

Did it start with the Loud family? Was that the place where we decided that the concept of “privacy” was outmoded? Was it live reporting from Vietnam?

Or is the problem that most of us would rather be on television than actually value our lives, so paparazzi, reality TV and all manners of everyday violence no longer touch us.

Have we all become inmates of Andy Warhol’s salon?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world


And at the speed of broadband, yet.

Observations in the mezzanine

I have a characteristic which separates me from my peers. When I am holding a ticket with an assigned seat number, I sit in the seat enumerated thereupon.

This establishes me as sadly parochial and unimaginative, I think. Seating charts have become just the most recent casualty in our modern battle for territorial supremacy. I have been seeing my seat number as an aid to peace, utility, and order, as a convenience. I should view my ticket rather as the pen with which to offer my challenge. I should enter the theatre and select any seat I fancy, a sort of cultural squatter’s rights, or droit de seigneur. I should take up arms against a sea of troubles…

no, that one’s suicide.
Surely Shakespeare has a role model for me, somewhere.

Ah. Twelfth Night.

'Youth, whatsoever thou art, thou art but a scurvy fellow.'

'Wonder not, nor admire not in thy mind,why I do call thee so, for I will show thee no reason for't.'

THAT’S the strategy I will embrace. I shall be Sir Andrew.

And, as Sir Andrew, I will sit mulishly in my seat at the ballet, while two middle-aged women in appropriate dress stand, fettered by their civility, attempting to convince me to vacate my new seat so that they can sit together, as originally planned.

Perhaps I will talk on my cell phone while doing it.

When arts organizations are attempting to broaden their base of support, do you suppose they ever consider such collateral damage? Do they say to themselves,

“Gee, we’d really like to reach out to people who don’t usually support the ballet. Sure, we’re taking a risk that half the people in the building won’t understand details like having private conversations in a whisper, but hey, it’s money.”

I suppose we see the same kind of problems at sporting events. People have always climbed down from the nosebleed seats during baseball games, for example. But my impression has been that when the guy with the ticket showed up, you grabbed your cap and ran for greener pastures. Maybe it’s all in the assessment of the owner you’re supplanting. If baseball ticket holders more often looked like ballet attendees, maybe the situation in the stadium would be collapsing as fast.

I tend to think, though, that part of the problem is money. There is a beautiful inverse slope in the relationship of perceived necessity and entitlement. If an experience is free, only minimal shoving and pushing is necessary to defend it. The greater the expense, the more making it a peak experience is essential to your “amour propre”. The expense, however, would have to be charted against, say, wages per hour. Ballet tickets aren’t the same to everyone. This, by the way, explains why people seem to be convinced that all theatre experiences require standing ovations. Since theatre is COMPLETELY a luxury, now that we can watch “reality” TV 24/7, the fact that you’ve plunked down wages on it must mean it’s wonderful.

I should mention Thorstein Veblen on this.

“The canon of expensiveness also affects our taste in such a way as to inextricably blend the marks of expensiveness, in our appreciation, with the beautiful features of the object, and to subsume the resultant effect under the head of an appreciation of beauty simply.”

I’m not willing to endorse such a highly subjective version of the merits of art, but I can certainly agree with it as a component.

Doesn’t really solve this seating problem, though. Maybe it’s a Second Amendment issue.

Today is a day of ghosts

I woke from a dream of lost love, someone who died many years ago. These dreams have their compensations. In a world where everyone who dies goes before I’m finished with them, a brief reappearance in this form comforts me and reminds me that Reality is only palely mocked by my Platonic shadows.

But I have come to be wary of days that start so well.

My understanding is too imperfect for much overlap with the Sublime. The uneven Zen of an ordinary day meshes poorly with my complicated relationship with the eternal. I am torn between my need to consider issues essential and large and the possible arrival of a badly needed plumber. I suppose one of the hallmarks of the enlightened is the ability to balance these things with grace, although a complete indifference to clogged pipes might be another way to go.

On a day like this, I’d like to curl up with a mound of books and consider these options, but I suspect that’s neither enlightened nor wise. I don’t believe I’ll be able to happen upon a recognized authority who endorses such self-indulgence. Even Hitchhikers have a towel.

Which brings me, however obliquely, to news I heard yesterday. A friend of mine, a neighbor, has been diagnosed with dementia. The very idea fills me with sadness and terror.

This would not be the first person I know whose mind has eroded this way. A favorite teacher of mine had his tide come in too soon. A parent from my youth lost many brain cells to a heart attack, and now lacks the acuity that characterised him for so long. And a brilliant man, a cryptographer during the Second World War, lost his wife and took his secrets into an increasingly pleasant-natured world, where he was the bane of the Alzheimer’s facility for his complete indifference to their complicated locks. When he felt like leaving, he left.

This is my first time, however, charting this journey with a peer.

I said above that my understanding is imperfect. Nowhere is that more clearly displayed than in challenges to my reliance on it. However I recognize the importance of faith, I still stand with Helen Keller, who wanted, “Not the peace which passes understanding, but the understanding which bringeth peace.” Here we all are in the Garden of Gethsemane.

It is my terror that the connections I have built to this world dissolve. Even having been told that I must lose this world to gain another, I cling to my tiny souvenirs of oneness rather than empty my hands. My attachment to the dead is unresigned, my attachment to the living likewise unfinished. I am in process. If there is an Enlightenment that requires detachment, it is not yet for me, because I am fiercely, passionately, unrepentantly attached to a beautiful world, stopped sink and all.

I am committed to my ghosts.

A gift to gie us

I have friends who blog. I have mere acquaintances who do, also, when it comes to that. People send me links to their most recent work, or to their blogs in general, or to something they posted that has relevance (they hope) to me. I will usually read these linked posts. I am not, however, a good citizen of the blogosphere.

First of all, most of us, (and I certainly include myself, here) have very little to say even on matters of crucial importance to us. Lengthy discussions of things which do not concern us at all do not make for good writing, but other people’s business is the number two reason for the invention of speech, number one being bragging and complaining about oneself. Blogging draws on the worst of both worlds. So I like to be sure that the angels of my better nature are on full alert when I open a page of someone’s ramblings. Unfortunately, my angels, like most people’s, are pretty much at full tilt monitoring my reactions to annoying neighbors, incompetent members of Congress, and the new front end manager at my grocery, so taking them for a brisk trot through the random jottings of someone I knew 20 years ago is not often a reasonable use of their strength.

It is sometimes interesting to, as the poet said, see ourselves as other’s see us, although the version one gets may not be flattering. However, since good story doesn’t require accuracy, I come down firmly on the side of ‘good story’, even at my expense, barring things actionable. It concerns me somewhat that blogging seems to be replacing actual journalism, as opposed to actual journals, but since my personal newsworthiness is limited, that’s another topic.

I am left wondering why people blog.

One bipolar friend blogs because he cannot find any object in his environment except his computer. His blog is the most consistently interesting of the ones I skim, because it is so patently a quest for order in an increasingly disordered universe. It is Entropy at play. It’s also sad for me, personally, especially since I can contrast it to his pre-illness condition.

But my friends whose issues are perhaps more subtle are no less on display.

One’s blog is characterized by the infrequency of its posts. It’s as if he, too, is not sure why one does it, and cannot stay on task long enough to find out. His posts are like bottles resolutely washing up on the same littered beach, having lost their notes on the way.

One friend has a blog ‘community’ of sorts. His readers chat and link back and forth, and are occasionally chastised or banned. Given that banned ones are wiped from their electronic records for whatever their transgression, I try to imagine how his Old Testament wrath was triggered. It would be interesting to visit the alternate universe where pillars of salt can give their version.

I know a woman who, in a compulsive Munchausens by proxy frenzy, writes endlessly about her daughter’s “difference”. It’s a miserable experience to read her reams and floods of pain, all ostensibly in the service of how truly blessed they are. Please do not misunderstand me. I actually believe she is neither more nor less blessed than any parent. But that’s the difficulty. She wants her experience to be MORE significant than any other experience. The world is a cruel place that cannot be twisted to a perfect solipsism for her, much as she tries.

Perhaps that is the common thread. We storm Heaven for an external reality to verify our own, and failing that, try again. A journal would be internal. A faith would be eternal. A blog replaces them as an activity which is meritorious (particularly if you’re good at it) without being significant.

It seems like selling reality short, put that way.

Okay, I'll admit it.

My church attendance, these days, is kinda spotty. Like, now that my friends have, for the most part, given up on weddings, I hardly ever have to locate Sunday clothes for any reason.

However, some mad atavism prompted me to try to get to an Easter service, mostly because years of choral singing left me a wound in the shape of multipart musical arrangements which is not quite filled by the contents of my local college radio.

And since I'm far enough from my churched roots that I'm no longer embarrassed by my non-participation, I can drop into a pointy building whenever I feel like coloring in my program during the readings.

Easter, one supposes, would be a big day for such occasional visitors. You'd THINK churches would be on the make, at least so far as to have information like 'Kyle Emerson, of our youth group The Resurrectors, will be favoring us with his own arrangement of "Christ the Lord" scored for bassoon and flute.'

No such luck, in my area.Trolling on a dozen websites (after an embarrassing amount of memory games on the subject of "The big brick one, with the car washes. What's its name?") failed to unearth even simple information such as "Easter Service is at 10." Many of the websites weren't even clear on the date of Easter, apparently considering this whole 'movable feast' thing a quaint holdover. If the 12th of March was a dandy Easter last year, why change?

Well, for one thing, the weather's much nicer, right now.

But it left me, without access to the newsletter, wondering just where and when Kyle's skills would be on display. Because the LAST thing that would help me tap into my love of all things renewed would be to chance upon a church with exaggerated notions of the kiss of peace, and an entertainment component that runs to puppetry.

The world wide web is so big. And yet, the information on it so minimal.

A little Handel wouldn't kill ya would it? I might just need to spend the shank of the evening driving around, hoping their signs are updated more often than their webpages.

Happy Easter

The dancing bear problem

One of many problems associated with arts aimed at the masses (and particularly the masses of minor age) is the dancing bear problem. It is not, in fact, that the bear dances so well, it's remarkable that he dances at all.

So people planning and programming for school groups, or children in general, go to elaborate pains to make sure art in performance is sufficiently banal to resemble television, or Game Boys. The Democratic Party has a similar strategy.

Once everything has been thoroughly eviscerated and the remnants embalmed, we are safe to proceed onward, secure in the knowledge that theatre , or dance, is a quaint imitation of the real arts, as embodied by Sesame Street and Nintendo. Support of them is an act of charity, because the possibility that they were actually interesting, or relevant, or different, has been tidily disposed of.

Here's an idea. Let's throw kids, whose intelligence, like that of their parents, varies, into actual art. Let's ask kids with military families what they think about Lysistrata. If we must pull them off Grand Theft Auto for a cultural excursion, let's send them to watch the Scottish play, gore and guts intact. Bring them to classical ballet (maybe not all hordes of swans, but something you would CHOOSE to see) and let them get a good look at another form of "hang time."

No. The arts organizations would fold in a month, without all those talking mice doing 45 minutes for busloads of kids at public expense. Never mind.

Of course, the possibility that adults running these things just have no sense at all IS the statistical favorite. Hence the half-dwarf production of The Doll's House, I suppose.