2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us

wake up and smell the roses

2.0+ The Machine is Us/ing Us - Dance Mix

Transparency

“People often sound dumber and more incoherent on paper than they really are.” – Peter Elbow, Writing with Power

As a writer I am fascinated by the many ways in which people relate with their own subjective process of writing. This is not a unique fascination on my part, but I do wish to focus on the subjectivity of writing here.

The nearly illiterate laborer who writes a shopping list of boards and nails and glue for building a closet, with their misspellings, lack of order, rough handwriting and omissions presents an example as intriguing in what is revealed by ‘text’ associated with a human creator, the list maker, as with the workings of a highly refined poet, a potentially more subtle list maker. We will try to avoid novelists, short story writers and flashers for our examples and focus on seemingly polar extremes.

The laborer in general hopes that their effort to write will result in someone going to the lumber yard, purchasing the appropriate materials, and returning with those materials to the worksite. That they write ‘screws’ means something to them, but the person standing in the aisle faced with a vast array of hundreds of different kinds of screws may feel at a loss for detail. Long ones, short ones, stainless steel, galvanized, brass, slotted or exotic, wood or machine?

The poet we do not always know what they hope for in their composition and in part the delight we often have in not-knowing and the potential to discover may be our most compulsive reason to read their list, but even with a poet there is usually something, some end-goal that they generally aspire toward as a result of their effort.

Granted that when a poet writes ‘screw’ it can mean many more things than intended on a lumber shopping list. In the case of many young writers the word brings up an image of horny birds with plumage where the poesy list making is a hope to attract sex. This intention, this motivation is prevalent and transparent on the internet for anyone who has a mind to look around the aviary. For some writers it is a desire to remain in a paid position and a need to publish, a need to get a quota of closets built in order to remain monetarily viable. Regardless it is difficult to imagine no motivation to exist prior to poetic composition, any more than that there would be no desire to assemble the parts needed to build a closet if the actual desire of the list maker is to drive a truck, and not to build a closet.

There is a phenomenon that occurs in the process of written composition in which the writer, be they laborer or poet where they know, understand, and imagine more than what they are able to convey in the text that they have written.

I stand in the hardware store and I look at the list and say, “Exactly what type of screw am I supposed to purchase here?” That question, if one actually cares to know the answer, initiates a process of having to find out, to seek out, to trace down, to call on the cell phone and ask, “What do you mean by this?” Or, it results in, “Gosh, I don’t know. I will get the blue ones and see if they work.” Either the originating writer of the shopping list gets what they need, and they move on with building closets, or they do not. The reader of a poem gets what they need, or not, or move on.

If one accepts that the intent of an author is not important to the reading of a text, then for a writer to leave out maybe three-quarters of the story may result in a text that is generally useless or at the least unsatisfactory to very many readers.

This is one reason why if you are inclined as a writer to write a story for closet builders that a primary suggestion is that the sentences are kept simple, and short, very brief, and minimal. If kept to simple communications, like ciphers, it is hard to imagine anything left out, and very easy to imagine a whole host of received meanings, none of which need be bothered by the need to buy the rightly needed type of screws.

In the case of my being able to call up the laborer and ask them for clarification I do not stop for more than a nano-second to determine a theory of poor communications through written media (Ugh, I should have asked him when he handed me the list!), we simply want to know what kind of screw we are supposed to put in our cart. This immediacy is aligned with the point-and-shoot school of conflict resolution. But in the case of a poet, particularly when they are deceased, there is not always very much to go on. Not a whole lot of ways to call them up on the phone and say, “WTF did you mean by ‘blue concrete carport dizzy in the genome’?”

Though I will admit that I am a proponent of phone calls to the dead, rarely do they respond. As likely to respond as a celebrity poet.

So, for an example: A daily record of weather information specific to Podunk, presented as a poetic composition may be of interest to Podunkers (a crossroad in the NY State Finger Lakes region), but remain inaccessible to all those not of Podunk, who never visited Podunk, and who have no idea why there is a prevalence of pig farmers in Podunk. Bet you did not know any of that.

And when I visited Podunk, climbed through the fence and walked right out there into the field and read that Weather poem for those farmers they were curious in their reception. Though weather is relevant to their livelihood they were hoping for a story with beginning, middle and end, a good joke line or a moral to it all, and not a need to decipher the aesthetic history of weather. Possibly there was a semiotic sign-symbol gap, my delivery was mumbled, or we can blame it on the weather. Here I thought that my voice was admirably attuned to the universe. Water is water. Sun is sun. Pig shit is pig shit. Not knowing quite what to do with me they invited me to dinner that evening where I proceeded to drink their bourbon -- then later on the somnolent porch I tried to hit on their least attractive daughter.

One does not need to be a critical enthusiast or academic extremist in order to feel that there is an inadequacy that can, if one so desires, but rarely does one really desire, to trace back to the poet and dig out of them what it was that they may have meant, or that they imagine it is that they were conveying. It takes a mental reader to read minds through a relatively blank text, and that mentation is very much like work. There are those instances when the motivation to write a list is to avoid substantive work. “Gosh, rather than measure and cut this board to make it exactly fit I will spend fifteen minutes with a pencil to my lip, and write this list.”

This came up to my mind yesterday in reference to something totally alien to creative writing or shopping lists, it had to do with how an estimate for construction work is formulated by one individual working in a solitary mode, without need to necessarily play with others, and how they can themselves, all to themselves without interference be very satisfied with dollar numbers that make sense to them, but have no attachments of ‘roots’... in that I mean here that a person from the outside coming at the estimate cannot easily see where it came from, how it was assembled, or what any of the assumptions were that went into forming it, or informing it, or sometimes not informing it.

So, desiring a list that is comprehensible to our general state of flow through confusion we ask for transparency. The level of transparency is that we are given what they see, what is transparent to them, but somehow lacking in the details to make any useful sense out of the information whatsoever. It is kind of like where faith begins.

I am reminded in math exercises in school the discipline to trace back to the origination and the habit of leaving behind calculations to delineate a trail that was followed... I admit a habit we wean ourselves away from when we use a calculator... but at some point people contained within their selves seem to lose the need as individuals to know from where it was they arrived.

“We got here. It is a wonderful sunny day for a picnic. What is your problem?”

But this does not do well for the needs of a reader, who very well may want to know what is missing in a story, or very much need to know what is missing in a cost estimate, or exactly which screws to purchase, if given the reasonable opportunity. In the final end it occurs to me that the majority of the world functions on not paying very close attention. In my mind this lack of attention is a good thing.

What I derived from this line of thought is that the solitary individual may or may not be transparent to their selves... they may not have that level of “understand thy self” for there to be a consciousness on their part that they need to translate out of their own cloud of understanding, or fug, or whatever goes on inside, all those bright shiny imaginings that go on wily nily in their head, and to understand that to be transparent to the world-at-large, or a readership or your fellow construction team, one needs to be to a degree rigorous in transparency to oneself, at least to nail down details and communicate them accordingly so that people who are other than and outside of oneself can take action, either action to build a closet or action insofar as to read a story and understand some of it.

“The father, as ruler of a realm of pig manure, is also associated with anality and waste, a common association frequently uncovered in psychoanalysis.” -- Ken Sanes, frm Mad Max as a Disguised Account of Personal Development: Ethics, Independence, and The Family Drama

Sharing Spaces

first published Gator Springs Gazette, Life Sentences, August 2004

click the arrow to start the audio >>


check out the writer's spaces here at Sitting Pretty Magazine

A sense of work space--for an architect a sense of space is a tactile feel of narrow enclosure, of walls and the density or lightness of their materials, the sun penetrates through stained glass windows, the sound of a sibilant murmur echoes, the smell of a cavernous hollow and the feel of the stone floor as it is walked upon. Tibetan monks bang their drums. For a poet space is like a rapidly expanded universe without end, the topographic map winds as far as the umbilicus of the disembarked soul will reach. And then there is the place where we sit and write.

"You don't just sit down and write that stuff out, do you?" The answer is, "Well, NO, not exactly."

I sit at my keyboard and I look out past the monitor through the window and the leaves of the trees are green with the early sunlight from the east filtered through over the Atlantic. I can just pick out amid the biosphere and fresh birdsong the white and blue edge of the bow of my neighbor's boat perched in his mown yard. I am at the helm of my imagination in this space. I invent myself as a small Mark Twain secluded in an isolated pagoda in Elmira, NY where I look out over stretches of timothy fields with goats and cows in them and tentatively peck at this newfangled typewriter. My family flutters around me and the energetic dog Mudslide waits outside on the porch, or comes inside begging for me to come out and play in the lawn.

Here I am on a lazy boat in the Caymans in pursuit of tarpon while I smoke a Cuban cigar. From this roost I can see the Post Office of Hell. A friend of mine told me the last time he was here it was a hundred feet under in a sub in the 50s. It is his confined space to remember and mine to relate as I sit in this writing space on Long Island, east of Manhattan in the unHamptons, and write of a sense of place that is noplace.

Or I am Stephen Hawking's spiritual clone, confined to a wheel chair afloat in a hot air balloon where I imagine entire universes and black holes while I peck out with a soda straw on keyboard instructions to my students on where to look for the hidden mystery of one. A space can be so many things to match our desire to fill. I am within his space of body and without of it in story. Like with Baudelaire, I am anywhere and anyone I want to be but here.

It is an elaboration of the advice to those who want to be writers to find a space within which to write, to form a habit of writing. We seek a space within, more likely a space within which we can be most within ourselves comfortable to dream ourselves different, and in a dream to become as that which is and is not this person confined within and without and yet entirely free. We each make it as our own cell, a few stuffed cats on the firm shelves smile at us, paper rockets lay dormant next to duck decoys, or we sniff the subtle burn of sandalwood incense mixed with a scent of sauteed garlic in the back grounded kitchen. My cave, I wander all around in and out of business--battered here and there with the cosmic tide, I get a haircut or fix a flat tire or ease blindly into the ocean's surf or find myself arrested--and then I retreat to my cave where I write, and rewrite, and communicate, with you.

I am surrounded by books, sorted, unsorted, piled up on three sides. There are precarious cliffs of non-reference books anchored to the desk, while more humble piles of them tower over the threatening arcs of flying buttresses escaping from the floor. A fourth side of the space is left partially open, just enough room to avoid the tangle of computer wires. It is to this writing cave that my broken body returns to find the dream where my mind runs wild, wickedly, softly, near close to slumber and catatonia on occasion, excited, angered, confused, drunken with your imagination, but always with a desire to be free. It is this place to write.

Sound Poetry: Eight Geese

Listen to this sound poem at Poesy Planet.

Eight Geese

...........o-ak, o-ak, o-ak

o-ak

o-ak o-ak, o-ak, o-ak

ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch

o-ak, o-ak, ch ch

o-ak, o-ak o-ak, o-ak o-ak

ch ch o-ak, ch

ch ch o-ak ch, ch ch

o-ak

o-ak, o-ak o-ak o-ak ch ch ch, ch

ka, ka ch ch o-ak ka, ch

o-ak ka, ka ch o-ak

ch ch ka o-ak o-ak o-ak ka ka ch ch ch ch ch ch, ch

o-ak

ka ka ch, ch ka

ch, ch, ch

ch ch ch ch ch ch, ch ka o-ak o-ak

o-ak ka ka, ch o-ak

feather grouped under sun of white-green lilac

...........fragrant flocked

......................geese

o-ak.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

"I just published eight geese online." -- GO
"I did not know geese could be authors." -- Kathy Follett

Try to figure out what this traditional poetic form is about at Sound Poetry.

Text Analysis

Thanks to Matt Bell who today brought up the subject of the repetitive use of words, and someone else to mention the use of text analyzers... I was curious to check out a flash that I recently published at elimae, Tree Reader. This short text has developed a bit of interest for itself beyond elimae, hopefully more on that later.

The data below, not in a table format (meaning no vertical alignment) is confusing but interesting. For one thing, out of 104 words 93 are shown here as unique (without my going to any further work to verify this). For another, the Gunning-Fog Index for readability seems to be off the chart.

The most frequently used word in the piece is 'fell'.

A much longer (1,800 words) non-fictional essay, composed as an educational tool, came back with a Gunning-Fog Index of 10.

~~~

Textalyser Results
The complete results, including complexity factor, and other features

Total word count : 104

Number of different words : 93
Complexity factor (Lexical Density) : 89.4%
Readability (Gunning-Fog Index) : (6-easy 20-hard) 79.2
Total number of characters : 1006
Number of characters without spaces : 567
Average Syllables per Word : 1.4
Sentence count : 1
Average sentence length (words) : 197
Max sentence length (words) : 197

(in furrowed bark of the old basswood tree as i read an older brother say ten with a younger sister on the train she was all over the place in and out of the seat she fell in the aisle and taunted him then bumped her elbows into commuters who smiled or winced or stared defiantly or shut their eyes to retreat to sleep if they saw nuisance or themselves reflected in their memory of childhood as a climber of trees as he said eat and they ate cold fries and paper wrapped hamburgers she yelped and whined they spilled dark brown soda while all he wanted was his own seat to sit he pushed her down and off of his head where she grabbed the leaves away from his own room and as the commuter train slid on the iron line further east the passengers thinned out stop by station stop until eventually the young boy got to sit alone he fell over and slept and the ride fell quiet as it passed the old basswood tree in the lawn of the cemetery as i read in the metallic flicker of sunlight on the afternoon window)

Min sentence length (words) : 0

Readability (Alternative) beta : (100-easy 20-hard, optimal 60-70) -111.5
Frequency and top words :
Word Occurrences Frequency Rank
fell 3 2.9% 1
sit 2 1.9% 2
train 2 1.9% 2
own 2 1.9% 2
stop 2 1.9% 2
seat 2 1.9% 2
tree 2 1.9% 2
old 2 1.9% 2
read 2 1.9% 2
basswood 2 1.9% 2
Word Length :
Word Length (characters) Word count Frequency
3 56 28.4%
2 38 19.3%
4 37 18.8%
5 19 9.6%
6 14 7.1%
7 12 6.1%
8 8 4.1%
9 5 2.5%
10 4 2%
1 4 2%
Syllable count :
Syllable count Word count Frequency
1 133 68.9%
2 45 23.3%
3 13 6.7%
4 2 1%
2 word phrases frequency :
Expression Expression count Frequency Prominence
in the 3 1.5% 31.6
on the 3 1.5% 40.3
of the 3 1.5% 63.3
to sit 2 1% 31.4
his own 2 1% 39.5
i read 2 1% 50.5
as i 2 1% 51
basswood tree 2 1% 53.6
old basswood 2 1% 54.1
the old 2 1% 54.6
3 word phrases frequency :
Expression Expression count Frequency Prominence
as i read 2 1% 50.8
old basswood tree 2 1% 53.8
the old basswood 2 1% 54.4
4 word phrases frequency :
Expression Expression count Frequency Prominence
the old basswood tree 2 1% 54.1
Unfiltered wordcount :
Expression Expression count Frequency Prominence
the 16 8.1% 39.6
and 9 4.6% 48.1
of 7 3.6% 50.8
as 6 3% 44.8
in 6 3% 57.5
he 4 2% 41.5
to 4 2% 50.4
she 4 2% 65.1
or 4 2% 71.1
fell 3 1.5% 37.9
his 3 1.5% 39.6
on 3 1.5% 40.6
they 3 1.5% 57.9
stop 2 1% 24.1
sit 2 1% 31.2
own 2 1% 39.3
read 2 1% 50.3
i 2 1% 50.8
over 2 1% 52
tree 2 1% 53.3
basswood 2 1% 53.8
old 2 1% 54.3
out 2 1% 54.8
her 2 1% 59.4
train 2 1% 59.9
seat 2 1% 63.5
was 2 1% 66.8
their 2 1% 67
all 2 1% 67.3
a 2 1% 76.1

Steinbeck: Not Found in Sag Harbor

Though I have lived on Long Island nearly 20 years I had never previously visited Sag Harbor until recently. I have heard of various artists who took up residence there – something about the light -- and I have held just a smidgeon of curiosity. I have certainly been out on the South Fork and done work in the Hamptons and at Montauk, but for whatever reason I had not gone to Sag Harbor. My forays to the Hamptons, which are closer to us than we are to NYC, have always been exploratory as in many respects the culture of wealth at play for me is prohibitively alien.

My travels tend to be brought on by either a purpose, as in business, or on the downside by no other reasonable alternative -- as in a wedding or funeral.

For a living I am in the business of fixing old buildings. My specialty, if I have one, and many who know me wonder what I actually do with my time, is historic masonry.

Whenever I have an opportunity to combine my writing and reading interests with my paid work I am always delighted. So I was quite happy, and intrigued to be asked to come out and look at the brick and limestone masonry ‘free’ library in Sag Harbor. The only problem with all of that is that the free library was actually looking for free work, on our part (my son being my business partner), thinking that we would be seduced to do a full survey of their really incredibly unique and absolutely amazing historic masonry, find all of the problems, and give them an itemized price list... in fact, tell them what to do, how to do it, and the materials to use. It is a scam that I have been stuck with in the past, and it was very clear to me once we got into conversation with our contact where we were going with it and what they wanted from us. It was also obvious to me that the person we were talking with had no clue what they were talking about, as far as the actual work goes.

They told us all of the granite steps need to be replaced and I looked at them and at the steps and wondered what in heaven’s name they thought was wrong.

They had no architect on board, no written scope of work (you tell us what we need to have done) and no specifications (we have a guy in town that likes to do that historic stuff and he will tell you the mix for the historic mortar but not any time soon, and we need prices by Monday). I was perplexed and came right out and asked them if they had the money for the project, and for whatever reason they were honest and told us they had no money at all (usually people wait until you have finished the project before they admit to that little detail -- and people wonder why contractors get antsy), but they want to get some.

I won't be shy, we need to get some too!

If we were to give them the information they needed then their intent is to go ask the taxpayers for a bond. I suspect that they had this idea, a lame idea in my mind, that if they could sucker a bunch of contractors into doing free work to come up with a budget that they could line themselves up for all of that “shovel ready” stimulus money we hear about on the news these days.

There is some sort of epidemic of irrational fantasy that folks come up with when they are associated with an old building that nobody but them cares much about. It is like being the used book seller that has to keep explaining that the collection of old National Geographic, the one’s Aunt Rose saved in the attic until she expired, stacked in very neat piles, are worthless.

Sag Harbor has a bunch of really neat old buildings that look like they will never be restored in this millennium.

I kind of felt like we had really wasted an entire morning, and these days wasting an entire morning without pay, and to have to pay for the gas to get there, it sort of hurts.

To do what they really wanted done would have taken me at least four days, three days on site and a day to estimate and write it up. That is a lot of time to put into speculation and I asked, “What chance have we of getting any work here at all?” “As much chance as anybody, we will look at your price and if it is a good one then we will come back to you.” That is the voice of a death knell for any idea that they will want a quality restoration, as the masonry butchers are always cheaper. So the game here is we get all anxious to tell them everything that they need to know and then they take it and shop it around for a lower price. Been there, done that. I would like to say some nice choice badass things right about now, but I remain polite.

So then while waiting for the sap (I think he was a kitchen renovation guy with a sad task to conduct this ruse as a favor to some local grand dame) to close the roof hatch and get down off the ladder I see this bronze bust on a pedestal. I go over to look at it and I see it is John Steinbeck.

There was also some rather nice Guastavino tile vaulting.

I think, oh, gosh, Joseph Heller is buried in Easthampton and one day when I was out there I tracked down his grave... and the plaque under the Steinbeck bust tells about how Steinbeck wandered all around the globe in a state of constant internal torment but finally found a place of peace and rest in Sag Harbor. I think, yes, rest, as in he must be buried here. You see, I had not exactly thought to do extensive research on the culture and history of artists in residence or entombment in Sag Harbor before we got up that morning and prepared to go out there.

Like almost anyone I read Grapes of Wrath under duress in school and a few of his other books at a time in my life when they did not grab me very well. But as an adult I read East of Eden, read it rather slowly and deliciously, and consider it for an American writer a must-read, as much as Huckleberry Finn is a must read. So my thought here is that we will not have wasted all of our time if we can go visit the grave of John Steinbeck and I get my picture took.

I ask the sap, I figure his being local he will know, if John Steinbeck is buried in Sag Harbor.

He has no clue, I mean; he has no clue who I am talking about even when I point at the bronze bust.

He suggests I ask the library staff. So we go down stairs and the person at the library desk, the one there in what looks like maybe it was supposed to be a brown uniform (either that or a weird sense of sailor's fashion), the person that would check out your books, and she has no clue who I am talking about.

I say that they have a bust of him upstairs... then think twice maybe she does not know what a bust is either.

She tells me to ask the woman dressed in white that walks up with the mop, and I ask. She has no clue either, but has some idea who I am talking about and she says if not here then maybe in New York City he used to spend time there as well.

Where in the world is John Steinbeck?

Well, we leave there and a friend calls me on the cell and asks me how things are going at the library and I say, “They suck. It all sucks.” My candor was genuine. I am a bit fed up.

I tell my friend about how the damned librarians, of all people, have no clue if John Steinbeck is buried in Sag Harbor, or not. They get no sympathy from me (Notice how the name plaque is kind falling off?). I tell him about the crap sucker ruse we walked into, he knows what I am saying, and I am slightly peeved at everything including the sky with the nice light right about then. We hang up. I want a coffee. I want to leave Sag Harbor. In a bit my friend calls back and tells us that Steinbeck is buried in Salinas, CA.

My son says to me, “Good thing we did not decide to just wander around and look in cemeteries the rest of the day.”