robwit.net

So . . .

. . . the scrolls I've been doing draw their inspiration, in part from vertical things like:

The misty centerline and sightline grandeur of Fan K'uan.
Under "Exhibitions," under "Painting" see "Travelers Among Mountains and Streams."

The fabulous handwriting of Su Shih (aka Su Tung Po).
Under "Scholar Art", look at Su Shih's "Former Ode on the Red Cliff"

The pacing and drama, in black and white, of Hsia Kuei.
Under "Exhibitions," under "Painting" see "Remote View of Hills and Streams," click to get pop-up window; scroll right-to-left

The dreamy detail and silky emergence from the fog of Ch'iu Ying.
Under "Exhibitions," under "Painting" see "Spring Morning in the Han Palace." click to get pop-up window; scroll right-to-left

In this context see my own meager El Dorado (horizontal), and Blue Company (vertical).

"Allah is really angry," said a friend as we watched the fearful symmetry of Hurricane Rita consolidating and moving relentlessly --- at a jogger's pace --- toward the gulf coast.

Natural disasters will either affirm one's faith or rock it, but they won't leave it alone.

The great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 was a key event in the history of the Enlightenment, and was called by some critics "the end of optimism." Every thinker took a side, many concluding that the event was evidence of a failure of authority ---- specifically the failture of the supreme diety's benevolence or his power.

How will our culture spin this double hit of category fives? And it's not even the gnarly part of hurricane season --- that is October.

Follow Moose and Squirrel to the new Swenson Sci . . . I mean . . . follow Moose and Buffalo to the new Swenson Science Building!

When you sight these fine beasts, you are almost at the narrow skybridge, and your journey (to my classroom in the fab new lab) is near its end.

"Navigation" is such a frequently-used metaphor in web design. But, as I tell my students . . . at some point we must remember that we're just sitting here in front of a screen . . . we're not "going" anywhere . . . the vast copy machine of the wwweb is simply sending us copies.

So when we find ourselves with true navigation tribulations it is instructive.

Our classes meets in the new Swenson Science building. Where is the new Swenson Science building anyway? I can see it when I drive by . . . but how the heck do you get there?

When you start to see signs like this one, you know there's a navigation issue . . .

. . . so many helpful souls putting up vernacular signage to try to assist the wayward scholar . .

.

And perhaps loveliest of all, this provocative warning:

"Foot Traffic Only" . . . what, have people been bringing their horses into the new building?

Hi there! Well . . .

. . . if you want to take an efficient introduction to the world of blogging . . .

take a look at this

http://www.electricmist.net/

then see some more Katrina blogs at

http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/002862.php

then bookmark this (it will be a required text this semster)

http://jilltxt.net/

. . . then take a quick look at these, and follow up a few links on each of them . . .

http://www.michaelberube.com/

http://www.antropologi.info/blog/

http://classroomconnection.blogspot.com/

http://www.thestage.co.uk/newsblog/

http://mbaleague.blogspot.com/

http://www.upforanything.net/poker/

When I arrived for the first of my interviews of the remarkable Leif Brush --- Professor (of conceptual and sound art) Emeritus --- he had five (5), count 'em, fünf (cinq) microphones set up on the table, microphones from different decades, a history of postwar radio and recording.

The jewel of his mic collection in my eyes, the old RCA double-diamond-shape; how beautiful!

I was asking him about his adventures in radio --- in the Army, as a "tape reporter" in the '50s & '60s splicing news reports with a razor blade and sending them to the station from the mobile VW bus --- and I was enthralled with the answers.

Radio is the other half . . . the hidden half . . . of my inspiration for writing (the more obvious half being the visual/verbal intersection between graphic design and writing.)

My lifelong love of radio is what gives me a sense of the musical/temporal beauties of serial literature . . . effects that reveal themselves in episodes over days, weeks, months,

Leif's sensibility to radio is so resonant with mine . . . a love of the sheer connectivity of networks: he describes with glee the moment in the old days when the entire NBC radio network would switch from originating a broadcast in New York to originating one in San Francisco . . . the gorgeous series of clicks as operators manually unplugged and replugged big-ass, olde-school regional switchboards . . . the original web,

My solution to the seemingly perennial money troubles of the Great Lakes Aquarium?

Simple! Just turn the aquarium into a first class fish restaurant!

 Try the fresh walleye special!

The place is in a great location, it's got great architecture . . .

. . . and the sweet part is you wouldn't have to buy any inventory for the first two weeks, at least!

I'm hearing about British graffitti artist Banksy on all sides these days.

Quite a nice stir he caused by insinuating some nice, small pieces of his own work into A-list Manhattan museums recently. These minor coups are listed on his website modestly under "Exhibitions." My museology sources muse that there's likely to have been inside help for the Bankster . . . who has a typically tortured, love/hate relationship with the idea of official fame.

I'm excited about this book: Carnet de Voyage, by Craig Thompson.

Thompson penned (or brushed, rather . . . he draws & writes with a brush) the quite-popular graphic novel Blankets. This book begins, as so many exciting works do, with a disclaimer. He says:

"This is not "the Next Book," but rather a self-indulgent side-project --- a simple travel diary drawn while I was traveling through Europe and Morocco from march 5th to May 14th, 2004."

What I love about this book is that by being a "simple travel diary" Thompson slips out from under the obligation to have a consistent narrative voice and narrative style. Some pages are narrative, others are just drawings. He pictures himself realistically sometimes, & cartoonlike sometimes when he wants a bit of emotional distance, or for other complex emotional reasons.

Style-wise he can turn on a dime, he can go anywhere from anywhere. Hey, it's just a travel diary. That stylistic flexibility is great --- just what language arts needs right now. We do it in speaking all the time. Some postmodern writers do it in a ponderous, pompous, laborious way. Thompson does it in a way that is soooo light, so appropriate to the moment.

Plus, it's a very powerful effect to see portraits drawn from life while conversing with the subject. Knowing that about an image changes it, right?

(with it's gold statue of "Mrs. Rennebaum" --- a student joke of years a-gone; Rennenbaum's being the big, local drugstore chain)

just before dusk turned to night, under a near-full moon, laughing and telling stories.

The fabulous lobby of the Julien Hotel in Dubuque is a dim, dark, '30s-movie-style classic --- deep carpet, a once-bubbling fountain, cracked leather furniture, ferns to hide behind, a barbershop, and a German cellar restaurant (once a speakeasy?) down the velvety stairs.

Chicago gangster Al Capone used to retreat across the Mississippi to flee Illinois warrents and stay here, the college kid at the desk told us. He laughed when we asked if there was a room available. The place was a ghost town.

Above the front desk is an incredible hi-tech (for it's day) electric display that once shone your room number if you had a message. What messages in its heyday? "Your illegal hooch has arrived from Canada?" "Should we send up the usual girls?" "Mr. Jones is indisposed."

The Sunshine and Salad Tour began over astonishingly good (& cheap) curried lamb & beef, and poached salmon at the Harbor View Inn in Pepin, WI ("Lake Pepin, part of the Mississippi River" as the town's web slogan proudly proclaims).

J's glass of white wine glowed golden for 5 minutes in a single strand of sunlight that travelled 150 million kilometers for that sole purpose.

The sky was frosty blue, the shadows long, the banks still snowy, the river dark and fast.

So I've got a bunch of dots, but I can't connect them.

The dots encompass a major theme of the American Psyche . . . and a Briton who sees it better than we do.

The theme is boxing . . . or at least it looks like boxing.

The Briton is ex-paratrooper, ex-Hollywood nanny Mark Burnett -- producer of TV's reality show smash hits Survivor, The Apprentice and, now, The Contender.

Starting with his Eco-Challenge series --- which follows teams in an endurance race as they tremble, vomit, bleed, exhort and weep their way through gorgeous landscapes --- Mark Burnett has emerged as a minor genius at telling TV stories of competition that gleefully trigger fists-full of mythic echoes.

Another dot is likely Oscar Grand Champeen Million Dollar Baby, a relationship movie in a boxing setting say critics, about a grizzled old trainer and his reluctant help to an aspiring female fighter.

Two more dots are the recent documentaries aired on PBS about heavyweight champions Jack Johnson and Joe Louis.

Johnson the unapologetic black champion who joked in the ring and strutted like a peacock outside it in the dawn of the 20th century, notorious for dating white women, and whose victory in the "fight of the century" sparked race riots all over America.

Louis the quiet man, the new black champion, determined not to repeat Johnson's "mistakes,"surprised and defeated by Hitler's favorite, Max Schmeling, and then victorious over Schmeling in "The Fight," a rematch touted to settle the "supremacy of the races" question once and for all, a fight followed avidly on radio on both sides of the Atlantic.

A final, personal dot, a line of my own, penned during the Rude Trip Hamburg/Chicago Literary Expedition project as I looked at my upbringing through foreign eyes: "In America you're born with boxing gloves; what I want is hands."

So what to make of all this?

First, the genius of Burnett.

"Both The Apprentice and Survivor have something in common," says Burnett in a Hollywood Reporter interview, "which is dealing with the emotional pull that all humans feel from being excluded from something. That's done through either being voted off, in the case of Survivor, or being fired in Apprentice. . . . I'm a huge fan of Joseph Campbell. Both of those shows take that feeling of exclusion to a level of death. When you're fired, or in the case of Survivor, when the torch goes out, it's like being killed."

OK, so the man has a sense of the psychology of fear. But there's more. Much more,

Survivor and The Apprentice are morality plays, witting and unwitting. In Survivor, the one person not voted off the "desert island" by peers wins a million bucks. In The Apprentice, the one person not fired by Donald Trump wins a job working for him. If you call that winning.

Survivor, with its alliances and strategies, its ploys and double-crosses, is a morality play that opposes money and personal relationships --- the same dynamic that plays out in millions of American lives every day.

The Apprentice, with it's business-esque tasks and petulant meetings in the board room, is a morality play about pleasing a fickle boss, whose absolute and whimsical power is unquestioned. Also, obviously, the exact world in which most working people live.

The major technical achievement of Burnett (besides the love of helicopter shots he got from his Eco-Challenge days, and his sweet tooth for ritual and catchphrase --- "Tribe has Spoken; It's Time for You To Go " "You're fired") is the editing of his "unscripted dramas" as he calls the genre. Part of his genius lies in hiring clearly outstanding producers and editors, who build dramas out of tiny facial expressions, perfect cuts, red-herring clues, and a quiverful of brilliant visual tactics.

"In Survivor," says Burnett, "we go to the audacity of blue lighting on a long pathway. You're disappearing into the blue light (when castaways are voted off the show). These are the emotional hooks the audience relates to. . . . (After) someone is voted off each week, typically the lighting comes back to orange-y from blue, and (host) Jeff (Probst) will say, 'We'll see you tomorrow.' The tribe is living on. It's death and rebirth. That's totally what I'm operating off of, those belief systems."

But what is the morality tale that will be triggered by the new Burnett show, The Contender, a boxing show hosted by iconic Sylvester Stallone of the iconic Rocky films? What story is waiting to tell itself through the capable hands of medium Burnett.

Is the story the vaunted "purity" of boxing . . . the idea that bullshit gets left outside the ring and that, within the squared circle, one person clearly bests another person . . . without all the ambiguity and spun retellings of the rest of life?

Is the story the pure cruelty and catharsis of blood sport? The explicit purpose of boxing, after all, is to cause head trauma. Is it merely a legitimatized outlet for all that American anger? Anger about the American Dream's promise that you could be somebody, and you turned out to be nobody. This, of course, is the theme of Kazan's On the Waterfront, reprised almost word for word in Rocky and the promotion for The Contender.

Is the story a class story, but not the rags-to-riches one it thinks it's telling? Is it a class story about the time when, once the basic resources of our Island Earth have been divided, Survivor-style, and the task of managing them for their owners has been apportioned, Apprentice-style, all that's left to us losers is to fight to be the entertainer of the moment American Idol-style or Contender-style?

Is a boxing champion still a somebody these days? After the disgraceful. ear-biting, prison-bound, mental illness of a Mike Tyson? Or is a boxing champion merely a historical type, entirely mythic, an archaic ideal of a somebody, based on golden-age movies?

Is it a story about training and hard work? Jogging and dieting, working nights and weekends? In Burnett's tales, success is kind of about hard work . . . but only kind of. His fierce supervision over the casting of his unscripted dramas is the final component of his genius --- the ground rules are tilted toward larger-than-life personalities and more-gorgeous-than-life bodies.

The real competition in Burnett's universe is in the casting, and it is over by the time filming starts. Training and hard work? No. Training and hard work plus luck-of-the-draw genes? Yes.

Is it a story about luck, then, about gambling? Protestant predestination?

Is it a story about social skills and getting along in a diverse society? Not if the producers can help it. Burnett's "tribes" are assembled according to a screenwriters' psycho-demographic typology ("embattled single mom," "belligerant ex-marine with a heart of gold" "innocent farm girl") for their volatility and their likelihood to produce the screen 's two favorite moments --- the perennial Oscar-winning scenes --- yelling and sobbing.

Is it a gender story, like Million Dollar Baby, helping America get its mind around all the female soldiers engaged in combat right now in Iraq?

Or is the story simply that we Americans are culturally, mythically, doomed to fight? That we are perennial sore losers? (And we'd better get used to losing, as the Chinese Century begins.)

Dunno.

Yet.

Shall we watch The Contender together and see if we can connect the dots?

Sleep deprivation, right?

We know it's a big problem . . . motor impairment as bad as being drunk . . . cause of X0,000 highway deaths blah blah . . . high school and college students developmentally needing more than nine hours per night and averaging just over six. "Walking zombies" Cornell sleep scientist James Maas calls them.

And we all know the emotional symptoms, right? Irritability, edginess, inability to tolerate stress, problems with concentration and memory, behavioral, learning or social problems.

Duh, right?

But it wasn't until a good psychologist friend said . . .

. . . that it finally hit home for me.

All the fuss and bother people go to fix themselves up with feelgood drugs --- licit and illicit --- could better be spent by creating a cult of sleep . . . sleep as a drug.

But not sleep itself . . . not a subculture of 'jammies and dreams and puffy pillows.

No, a neurochemistry subculture of the day after a decent sleep. Sleep as the shooting up; resilience as the rush. Wine lovers with a palate for premium Z's. Connoisseurs of alertness.

So how is America doing?

The test results have come back and . . . well . . . .

the news is grim in the Winter of '05. . .

the drugs have run out

(both presecription and illicit)

it's bone on bone in America

a monkey is on the throne in America

cold times have descended on America.

So what does one do?

One looks to Nature for guidance and reassurance . . . right?

To find balance and har moe neee.

W.D.N.S.? What Does Nature Say?

Take a sharp breath. Look outside for comfort.

The sun is in the sky,

the cloud is on the . . . WHAT TH !?

The cloud is on the lake!

The freaking cloud has fallen like a freaking rock
and is sitting on the freaking lake!

It's 26 degrees below zero and the cloud is too cold to fly.

Ten four, Nature! Message received!

"What's down is up, what's up is done."

By afternoon the cloud gives up the ghost, and the South Shore is visible again . . .

. . . with the factories pumping out the ol' noxious . . . and the harbor frozen solid.

It's back to the same ol' new ol'.

And the Northland got so jealous of our all the attention we paid the beauties of the South West Desert landscape . . .

. . . it's been outdoing itself to produce mindbendingly spectacular sunrises since we got back.

Gotta keep nature on its toes. Work it! Work it, that's right!

See!

See, I was right! That saguaro cactus is giving me the finger!

I am not imagining things!

Look!

The rain is hitting that odd castle-like stone on purpose to spook me . . . or it's an advertising ploy for the movie Phantom of the Opera!

Like I always say --- nature is a vast advertising scheme!

Look!

The rain is hitting that odd castle-like stone on purpose to spook me . . . or it's an advertising ploy for the movie Phantom of the Opera!

Like I always say --- nature is a vast advertising scheme!

<

Our mission: through our magical presence, to bring much needed relief from 8 years of drought to the suffering South-West of our nation.

Mission: accomplished!

Record rainfall continues to pour on the Los Angeles region.

Here, left, a break in the clouds at fabulous Laguna Beach.

Show-offy saguaro cactus busting a gut to get our attention at Lake Pleasant (man-made).

Come on!

Have some dignity.

Palm trees take an extravagantly long time in line at the coffee shop in Blythe California . . .

. . . fumbling for change.

Here's a new form of poetry!

Voice recognition poetry!

And I Quote:

"They guys she's said that she know that this gets in new voice recognition software. It doesn't work very well as. But some how it's more interesting and if you were working. In that I go off the dependent. I am not drunk I have not been drinking this is just me being completely normal. But instead of writing and speaking if you haven't gotten that yet. I this place recognition has long way to go."

Wow!

It's my friend Kip. Being completely normal. Yeah. In that he goes off the dependent . . . as he himself states.

I want me some voice recognition software!

As the great Kip Swehla once said . . . er, wrote . . . er . . . said:

"Coalition were Oscar Mayer wean your
Vet is what it truly like to be
Possessed by war last dear Meyer wean your
Every one would be in love with me."

The same week the exhibition containing paper scrolls from Blue Company opened, Vika sends me the URL of this e-mail novel, Daughters of Freya. Mystery! Sex! Attractive price point! ($7.49 US; $9.99 Canadian) Good for them! Looks interesting.

I'm fascinated by sea-changes in demographics in our time . . .like the phenomenon of "mammoni" (mama's boys) in Italy --- an increase to nearly a third of men under 35 who prefer to live at home in the care of their mothers rather than move out and form permanent relationships.

According to one source, in Italy "Interference by mothers in their sons’ relationships causes 36% of breakups, compared to 25% in Germany and 18% in France."

Very low birthrates have Italian officials worried.

Another little tidbit was added to this social portrait the other morning in a National Public Radio report by Sylvia Poggioli in which she cited figures that Italian men are much less likely than their northern European or North American counterparts to help with household tasks and child care, and that this was contributing to the unwillingness of Italian women to have children.

Yeeesh!

Well, I guess I'm actually back.

Here's Our Story So Far . . . what's been happening while I've been Oh You Tea OUT of commission.

Allen amazingly has kept up his relationship --- long distance and all --- with Liselot . . . even after the embarrasing incident you can read below in these pages, They're flying cross country every couple of weeks to see each other. You never can tell!

'wordsman and Beverly are finishing up an intense creative retreat in the desert of the American Southwest. 'wordsman sent me a paper letter through surface mail, covered with drawings and raving about the music he and Beverly are writing. We'll hear it when they return.

Me? I'm teaching and making scrolls . . . 3 to 5 meter tall printed versions of messages from my novel in e-mail Blue Company.

And devising new versions of my personal mark the two tragedy masks.

Don't worry!

Just a few more days of rest and I'm going to be just *cough*

*cough* *cough* *cough*

*cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough*

Hokey, smokes, Bullwinkle! This *cough* *cough* this cold has turned into bronc *cough* bronc *cough* broncough *cough*

bronc *cough* *cough*

bronchitis!

*cough*

But I'm back and ready to pick up the story of my blough *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough*

*cough**cough**cough**cough**cough**cough**cough*

Hi there! I'm finally back from my *cough* *cough**cough**cough*

Hang o *cough* hang on! *cough **cough* *cough* *cough* *cough*

(Just a sec.)

*cough**cough**cough*

I'm finally back from the cold that has been plaguing me since *cough*

*cough * *cough* *cough*

. . . since *cough**cough**cough**cough*

Wow!

Finally the Fab Four (Allen, Bev, 'wordsman, & myself) are back together . . . and it's time to disperse and travel again.

At least those guys get to travel. So cool to see Beverly writing in the Mezangelle dialect, invented by the great Mez. Can't wait to see more.

'wordsman and Beverly are going to create a mobile lovenest in Vaison la Romaine, south of France for a short spell, Allen is spending a lot of (high quality, apparently) time in Chicago, and I'm here in the Nort' Woods tidying odds & ends for a week or so.

We have a rendezvous for a Literary Lunch (which I'm sure will be raucous, now that Bev is back) in the second week of June . . . and then we'll launch the fabulous summer season of robwit.net.

So, if I read 'wordsman's message correctly, Beverly is due back here next week. Woo hoooooo! It'll be good to see her. Get her story of the "healing rebuses" from her own lips.

I have such a videogame headache! Aaarrrggg!

I've been playing Samouraii, the Home Front for 3 days straight. I need help!

Samouraii, the Home Front is a highly realistic role-playing game set in the heyday of the Shogunate. It's designed to fill in the experiential gaps in other games --- it deals with everything but fighting.

Here's where I'm stuck --- Mitsuko's mother has moved in with us and is bankrupting the household with her retinue and driving everyone nuts. How do I earn enough Face Points to get Mitsuko's mom to move back to her family's estate before Lord Yamata pays his yearly visit --- without making Mitsuko angry???!!!

Also --- what the heck is the key to making point-winning Festival Verse? I'm counting syllables, I've got metaphors and metonyms up the wazoo, I've got surprising imagery that stays within traditional norms. But my bouquet always wilts! What gives?

See, Allen!

'wordsman reads this blog. He's responding to your questions.

Just in his own way.

(Good to hear it, 'wordsman.)

Allen . . . how can I say this . . . 'wordsman is 'wordsman. The man's gotta write what the man's gotta write.

But you can interpret it.

When you look at the googlepoem, it means --- Beverly's still in Tokyo. She and wordsman are talking on the phone. He doesn't know quite when she's coming back. And the mood of their conversations is . . .

. . . well the mood of their conversations is the mood of the poem. Pretty precise communication, actually.

Don't know if you know this about me . . . but radio is my favorite medium. It assuaged the loneliness issue in childhood and adolescence, and I've loved it ever since.

It has been my peculiar luck, over the years, to hear many, many "last broadcasts" of established radio personalities.

This morning was Bob Edwards' last day as the host of National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" (staple news source of American liberals and intellectuals). He was asked to step down. He sounded sore about it. He sounded pouty.

It resulted in an exquisitely awkward moment.

Here's how I heard it.

Edwards decided to bookend his career with an interview with Charles Osgood, likewise a radio legend, who is currently promoting his new book. Edwards' first interview as host of Morning Edition, 24.5 years ago, was with this same Osgood.

Well, apparently, nobody told Osgood.

Toward the end of an otherwise unremarkable interview, Edwards flopped out the fact that this interview was his parting gesture after a quarter century as host.

Osgood reflexively used the moment to charge ahead for to one further plug for his book.

Edwards, heart on sleeve, twisted slowly in the breeze for an agonizing moment.

Then Osgood seemed to realize the emotional weight of the moment for Edwards. He pluckily summoned up an improvised parting speech and a flustered piece of ritual encouragement.

My take? Edwards went off crestfallen. Osgood went off going "What the hell was that?"

It sonded like a weird emotional ambush. It was soooooooooooooo awwwwwwwwwwkward!

Look at this!

This image of an event that happened a couple of weeks ago in Norway . . . this image is what raw cultural energy looks like! Kids sharing creative work; lil' computer animations 'n graphics. This is an art-making scene that is actually happening. Context for this event is found here.

As opposed, I'm afraid, to our beloved e-literature scene, which I love wholeheartedly, but which, objectively, is not happening, and which I believe could use to think about its relationship with its audience a bit.

Yeah, yeah . . . I know how stultifying and trivial most of the stuff in the wacky-hacky demoscene is. But pure cultural energy is, in itself, a force to be reckoned with (and channeled toward depth, complexity, history . . . in our roles as teachers and mentors).

The impulses are among us . . . William and Scott spinning music while we write together . . . awareness of the experience of 'wordsmanship

I think we e-lit types should be aiming at an energy level like the one in this picture.

Have you ever watched someone write?

No, no, no . . . not watched the writer's body . . . but, rather, the writer's words . . . as they appear on a screen one by one, every pause . . . every hesitation, every pause shown in real-time . . . the suspence the tingling suspense as you wait to see what direction the sentence is going to head take?

Well . . . this weekend I had the privilege (and weird supreme language arts pleasure) of writing with the Unknown . . . working the same document at the same time from four different locations (Rhode Island, New Jersey, Ohio, Minnesota). . . producing this result.

Imagine the eager blinking of four different cursors on the page you're writing on!

The Unknown (Scott Rettberg, Wm. Gillespie, Dirk Stratton) are the notorious hypertext authors of this rambling marvelous hypertext novel, and inspiring to me not only for the quality of their words, but also the delirious enthusiasm of their process. These men love to write, and write together, and they'll write in bars, whilst trashing hotel rooms, and by invitation at educational institutions of ill repute.

Scott had us set up on a collaborative work program called SubEthaEdit. Each writer's words are marked in a different color. You can find exactly where someone else is writing at the moment by clicking on their her name.

I spent a fair amount of time just watching the others compose. Then I got into a weird little "haunting" game --- jumping right in ahead of, say, William's cursor and writing something lamely postmodern like "William could feel the presence of another author in the text," then erasing it and running off to pester Dirk for a while.

When I die, I think I'll make a really good ghost.

It's clear to me that biology is taking the place in culture that computer science has held for the past couple of decades.

In particular, neuroscience. Consciousness and emotion are physical processes and these are becoming knowable. No more conceptual split between hardware and software. Hardware and software . . .

. . . mind and body are, as the old truism goes, one.

So, what stories do we tell ourselves about mind and body? Historian of science Anne Harrington teaches a fascinating class at Harvard called Stories under the Skin: The Mind-Body Connection in Modern Medicine. She uses narratology to frame students' thinking.

I've been unable to find a place where she's published about these mind/body stories..

Dear Anne Harrington: please write a book about these stories!

Anne Harrington was kind enough to write back and say that yes she is finishing a book for W.W. Norton, modeled on this class, and tentatively titled Stories under the Skin: The Making of Mind-Body Medicine in American Culture. Hooray.

"Story One:
"The Power of Suggestion" (the debunking story)"
 
Harrington deals with topics such as: possession, hypnotism, imagination, power of suggestion, placebo effect
 
Story Two:
 "The Body that Speaks” (the mystery story)

Harrington deals with topics such as : repressed memories in the body

Story Three:
 "The Power of Positive Thinking"(the miracle story)

Harrington deals with topics such as: faith cures, Christian Science, power of positive thinking

Story Four:
 "Broken by Modern Life" (the story of lament)
 
Harrington deals with topics such as: stress, heart disease and the immune system

Story Five:
"Eastward Journeys"(the exoticism story)
 
Harrington deals with topics such as: meditation, chi, and stress

Story Six:
 "Healing Ties” (the nostalgia story)

Harrington deals with topics such as: loneliness, love and cancer

'wordsman . . .
good to see you.

At least here.

Were you hiding out from us when we visited your house?

Call any time.

We'll be glad to hike up the falls and see you.

Allen and I took off work and made the looooooooong drive and the loooooooooooooooooonger walk up the hill to 'wordsman's place.

It was mid afternoon today and we still hadn't heard from him. And none of us had heard from Beverly overseas.

Neither of them believe in phones. Or, only sometimes.

We worry.

'wordsman and Beverly live in what would be called a cabin, if it didn't contain a city's worth --- a lifetime's worth, two lifetimes worth --- of curated culture and erudition. It's a profound North Woods knowledge castle.

'wordsman and Beverly are "old hippies."

'wordsman and Beverly are not "old hippies" at all.

They breakfast on clouds.

They talk with Keats and Goethe.

They convince all the snakes in the woods
to spell words in their front yard.

They walk around naked if they want to.

They read aloud to each other in French by the kerosene lamp.

'wordsman and Beverly laugh and won't open the door.

They have the most varied and cool and international
e-mail friendships of anyone I know.

Anywhere in the world they go, the stay for free.

Anything you've just discovered, they already have a collection of it.

'wordsman and Beverly give the best advice ever

(if you coax them).

and cook the best food ever

(without making a fuss)

They've been everywhere

and done everything

but they always wind up listening with sparkly eyes

as you rattle on and on

about your own adventures.

We knocked, we yelled, we hollered.

We didn't find him.

We left him a note

and took the path back down the hill.