EXPLORING THE MYSTERIES

Early Lewis and Morse

Recently I confessed that I watch cop shows, but am not fond of “Blue Bloods” which is mostly an excuse to see Tom Selleck wearing Ralph Lauren — curiously, not Tom Ford.  Most of my favs are BBC Oxford-located series (Morse, Lewis, et al — not so much the BBC Manchester shows), which I love for the scenery and the pretence of being intellectual.  I’ve also have watched all the CSI programs I can access, which is why I can understand articles about the genome.  

There’s enough cross-over among actors and shared context in the West to make “Longmire” and “Saving Grace” sort of like loose repertory, which is something I really appreciate, esp since it delivers us from the Manhattan and Hollywood hegemonies.  In my undergrad years at NU, repertory was as much an ideal and goal as Method acting.  In fact, much of the pleasure of cop shows is watching the careers of actors who recur again and again, not just in the good guys who manage to stay alive, but also the bad guys who only get a few episodes before they are either shot dead or put away for good.  I love all the incidental scrawny old women and aproned shop-keepers.  Each of these shows develops a kind of philosophy and special knowledge.  “Longmire” directly deals with rez issues and “Saving Grace” picks up bits around the edges of rural life.

Longmire

By now I’ve become aware that the writers for TV series are serving the ends that once used to be the work of churches.  The stories are like sermons that explore moral consequences and suggest theories for reform.  It’s not just the cop shows — though they’re more likely to look at serious life-and-death issues.  Doc shows can do the same.  But there are differences between what is produced by one pulpit occupier with a particular denominational education, and the conclusions reached by a set of worldly people arguing out plot points around a table.  The latter are far more likely to have lived through some knotty situations and to have spent time speculating on what they meant.

Script writers, esp. for television and cable shows, do address that limiting Dunning-Kruger effect, the one about not only having a limited knowledge and understanding of the world, but also not knowing that their world is so limited, so circumscribed, so blinded by lack of experience.  Really not KNOWING.  It’s a major problem with techies who are constantly designing platforms for writers who deliberately challenge the limits of public experience.  The techies invent labels (boxes) and tags and impose them to function automatically but could NEVER think of the real and multiple categories that writers use.  

Luckily, they understand enough to leave some free space — partly because of indignation on the part of writers— but those tags added-by-author tags are category-busters.  Techies like categories.  Or the writers want to add fifty possible tags for Google.  But techies need limits.  They deal in IO.  In or Out.  They love questionnaires with four questions, a range of answers with five possibilities.  They put in a space for comments, but I’m betting they don’t read them because they don’t make sense to them.

I’m finding that it’s very hard to describe Dunning-Kruger to people with a limited experience of the world — it’s like trying to write an essay on the keyboard of an ATM.  AND, as the researchers said plainly, the people who believe in the Dunning-Kruger effect and know far more about the world than the people around them, will label the limited people IGNORANT, in other words punish them for not knowing that they don’t know.  

Around here, ignorance is considered willful.  It’s like refusing to accept knowledge and is related to the missionary’s conviction that THEY know what is to be known, without any interest in what their potential converts already know and which may be the reason they resist proselytizing.  People say to me, "Don't tell me stuff.  I worry enough already."

“Showrunners” introduced a new job concept that is particularly relevant in election season.  These are the people who make the product work.  We suspect Hilary is using high-powered (possibly covert) show runners and we don’t like her for it — but Trump’s showrunners can’t get a grip on him and we love the spectacle of it.  Television news is now going in and out of reality.  Elections are the long-running cliff-hangers.

The cop shows pick up on it.  “Awake” has a split but interacting story that even has double shrinks, one for each of two realities.  One is practical and one is sympathetic, but the protagonist won’t accept either one of them.  His own experience is double; he has a Mini-Me.  

“The Tunnel”  (BBC bicoastal) begins with a double corpse: top half of one victim and bottom of another — half on the English “side” and half on the French side, even though the space itself is in the English Channel under water, not land — and two teams of detectives, one Brit and one French, a pair who are the usual blundering but intuitive male with an unusually strict and nonglamorous woman.  They break stereotypes and introduce us to new concepts, for more existentialist than we are used to.  Still, neither has achieved the strangeness of politics, which are just as baffling on the Euro-side. 

The Wire

So far, few have reached the educational and moral significance of “The Wire” or “Oz.”  Those were worlds we didn’t know, but should have.  What others are out there?  We’ll probably never know.  The tangle of funding, recognizing quality, popular taste that is puerile and vulgar, critical feedback that is either wrong or missing, and constantly shifting means of access from huge flat-screens to pocket handhelds, make everything a game of hide-and-seek.  It’s possible to mount a production with almost no money but how do you distribute it without money?  It’s possible to marathon-watch a series all day long, for as many hours as you have the tush for, but then what do you do with that experience?

How do you keep the shaped and edited experience of second hand lives separated from what really happens to you, esp. if your job is repetitious, your home is okay but not special, your friends are boring?  Your family is — well, probably strewn across the continent.  My brain-damaged brother’s reality was "Seinfeld."  My aging mother’s was her memory.  Mine?  I don’t know until I’ve had my first morning coffee.  Until then, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.  But there are landscapes, indigenous people and sometimes lovers.  I don’t mean sex.  There is a lot beyond that.

PATTERNS AND PUZZLES AND JUST RIFFING

Techie stereotype

While friends of mine are wrestling with the Medium.com abyss between the platform-developing techies dominated by young California “Asians” -- maybe we could call them Confucians, since they revere authority, success, and doing what was always done -- and the wildly Celtic hairy writers who wish only self-determination and experiment (maybe we could consider them pagans or even barbarians), the rest of us who can spare time for thinking -- though that’s a little dangerous when driving to work -- would like to consider the complex and slippery category called religion.  It’s not unlike “writing” as a category.  One of those “humanities” things that get in the way.

The first thing to get a grip on is that the terms of being human have changed -- RADICALLY.  “Radical” means going to the roots, which means in this case “survival.”  So -- for the Blackfeet in early days, that meant tribal loyalty at the family level (including the in-laws, rather guardedly) to handle aggression, and harmony with nature, the source of food and shelter.  For some grizzled old wolfer with his bottle of strychnine, it meant obsession with the wolves and a willingness and ability to do whatever was needed: a situational lack of conscience or connection, enabled by the oblivion of alcohol, meth of the time.  The pattern remains in some places so it must be effective if you don’t mind having a short life.  Maybe the terms have not changed so much after all.

Contemporary wolfer

What change there is comes through technology that gives us access to the unseen, the inhuman world in all its complexity and seething connections -- star nurseries and gut biomes -- and its challenge to prove who we are.  The Abrahamic religions, which originated in the same place on the planet as our contemporary “sand wars,” are belligerent and unforgiving.  But Jesus, like Buddha, counseled compassion.  (His God went on being unforgiving.)  The question is compassion “for whom” and Jesus’ answer was “everyone.”  I’m not sure he included beetles or supernovas.  I'm not sure Paul agreed.

Giving up all this speculative fantasy, which is a Celtic sort of affliction of mine probably related to not drinking and which leads me into a kind of speculative ruthlessness (damned Puritans), I’ll go to H. Richard Niebuhr who simply looked at the “is-ness” of the American world, its version of organized religion.  The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929) suggests that people stick together when they understand each other and that is closely related to their economic success.  Most aware people understand that Anglican/Episcopalians are high-income, high-education, people who still shelter Brit class-categories.  Pentecostals tend to be marginal, low-income suffering people who can be ecstatic.  Then there were the denominations considered “mainstream” which were related to the values of the bourgeois shopkeepers: self-controlled, thrifty, clean, sexual only to the extent necessary to create children and consumers.

These denominations are sort of reductions of the 11th century revolutions of the major religions called “axial”, the Big Three:  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam which come out of each other over time.  Karen Armstrong spent a lot of time thinking and researching about these three monotheisms in terms of ideas, and had to consider Hinduism and Buddhism as alternatives defined as being -- um -- Axial-like in terms of importance, mostly indicated by size.  There have always been smaller groups, sort of ethnic or alternative or ecologically supported groups.  

To most people “religion” is all these organizations and bureaucracies, because as soon as there is enough population density, things have to get bureaucratic and written down, which means they are pinned in place, more or less.  Forget what these various groups say they believe.  That’s embroidery.  Most of them believe in survival and, if the situation allows, prosperity.  Prosperity comes from power.  With enough of it comes corruption and decay, ineffectiveness.  This is where institutional religion is today, mostly.  Reform is no longer idealism: it is survival.  And the prosperity may be missing.

I subscribe to religion newsletters (not as many as science newsletters) and have been reflecting on two situations:  Pope Francis who comes in to an organizationally petrified institution whose power and nature developed in Karen Armstrong’s Axial religion time (11th century) and is now forced to question the terms, like money-dependent survival.  And then, curiously, the growth of the Southern Baptists (example next door to me) which was based on the importance of conversion and strong (Confucian) rules of behavior.  The shocker is that they sent out thousands of missionaries through the planet but that the potential “saved” people are now busy with their smart phones creating micro-banks.  Worse, the reward on earth the missionaries were supposed to receive (pensions and a Fifties sort of old age peacefully dominating their lawns) was spent by the denominational leaders.  The estimate is that 80,000 jobless missionaries, some of them aged, are now wondering how they will survive.  I think some of them are counting on coming to Valier to revive the church next door, but their main supporters in this town have gone to Heaven, which one hopes has not spent their trust fund of Golden streets.

New understanding of the world, which is mostly science-based, does not define evil as “anything that departs from our norm” (for instance, binary gender assignments -- either male or female and only one of each can marry the other).  It says something far more radical:  gender assignments are arbitrary, sexual attraction and identity are fluid because they are an interaction between a physical/molecular creature and the ecologically organized universe.  Marriage is an economic arrangement.  Whatever it takes, including sequential multiple parenting.  One of today’s science newsletters says that tests of gender preference and identification in women show that women do not have desire only for the opposite sex.  Maybe it comes from cherishing and protecting babies, no matter what they're like.

Hefner is 89.

It remains to understand why “men” are so linked to power as synonymous with desire, sexual or otherwise.  (“Desire” being code for domination and control.)  And why are the markers of those who are “desirable” culturally connected to the small, blonde, weak, fascinating, and transient characteristics that some cultural commentators connect to ethnic history -- like the advent of “elfin” pale aristocratic Normans coming  among the low-class Saxons, blondes much preferred by Hugh Hefner until they are of voting age. 

Power becomes attributed to appearance, not just gender but color.  Satan is red and black: Celtic or African.  Other.  (I’m just riffing here -- not making claims.  It’s all unverified speculation.)  How many Catholic or Baptist missionaries went out to convert white people, unless they were really poor and clueless people who relied on superstition.   (Excluding the Abrahamic superstitions)  And forget that the Big Three religions were all Arab, though the Virgin Mary and Jesus had that blonde elfin look in European art.  Sort of glow-in-the-dark.

There’s an age-thing in here somewhere.  Confucius aged; Buddha did not.  An aged Jesus would be as startling as black or female Jesuses have been.  Judaism, which is the oldest of the organized Abrahamic religions, accepted and admired old age from early times.  Recent mainstream Protestant religious leaders in the pulpit (not the academy) have been young men who rolled up their sleeves to show their muscular forearms and challenged Satan to wrestle.  Now we are reduced to Billy Graham’s son writing a book that he purports was written by his century-old father to support the franchise, a family empire like our American political empires now under challenge by their own patriarchs. 

Fifty Shades of Pink.

As I think about it, some of these factors are highly relevant to Medium.com where the dominant style of writing seems to be female, young, blonde, sweet, elfin, and -- just below the surface -- hungry for money and power.  It’s not that the barbarians are crucified -- it’s just that they are pressed back into the forest where they won’t embarrass anyone.  Just riffing.  Just saying.  It’s all speculation and idle reflection.  But that’s writing!

Tomorrow I'll take on spirituality.  No facts.  Just riffing.  Whole different subject and it's NOT religion, which is bureaucracy and property.

NESTS DO NOT MAKE BIRDS

A group of techies

Not just on Medium.com but in a number of places there is an ideological struggle going on that most of us don’t even realize exists.  It is between the young mandarin techies of California (mostly) who have the idea that nests make birds (if you build it, they will come), and the aspiring entitled young writers whose acquaintance with wordsmithing is mostly gained through the lyrics of pop and punk songs DO come.  But no one cares.  Ev Williams is involved in some of this, since he links Twitter, Blogspot, and Medium.com.  Maybe the hopes for Medium were just too high.  But the hopes were secretly not about good writing at all -- they were about profit.  I use Blogspot, myself,  NOT for profit, but because it holds still so I don't have to figure out something new all the time -- NOT because I want to tinker with the html.

The American premise is that success is the product of “progress” in the sense of actively pushing numbers up and adding more gimmicks.  They are wrong.  Often success is the product of just sitting there, thinking.  Because the “nest” of thought and writing is in the brain, which is a lot of neurons, not a computer game.  The catch phrase is “generative plasticity” meaning that the brain physically re-shapes itself constantly to accommodate new experience and the thought it evokes.  I have read ever since the “eureka” moment about 1944 when I realized that the marks on the page were words and “Jack and Judy” plus their parrot (a primary school reader alternative to “Dick and Jane”) were in a virtual world I could visit at will.  This was the nest for writing.  It didn’t just grow, it transformed as it went to fit what rested there.

Song bird nest built by a BIRD.

One cannot attract condors by building robins' nests.  The real trouble with Medium is that the techies are conventional, the pride of their families, and utterly blank when it comes to breaking out of the crowd -- they didn’t want to do that anyway.  They just want to overachieve on some scale they learned in grade school -- stickers and A+ grades.  It doesn’t work like that.

What you think about, you become.  If you think about money, you become money.  If you think about technical coding, you become technical coding.  If you think about writing, the number of neurons in your brain about writing increase, complexify (there are over 200 KINDS of neurons that specialize in aspects of awareness), and swell into literature worth reading.  

Condor nest in the crevice of a cliff -- bird in center, I think.  

Remember how big a condor is.

What many readers are after is feeling.  Coding will not let you feel.  Feelings are the foundation of being human.  Trauma takes it away.  Coding takes it away.  Modern suburban successful swimming pool espresso sophistication takes it away.  It is a mistake to think that extreme sports/sex/
vehicles/stunts will make you feel.  Extreme things like fire-eating and wire-walking are not the point, though they will teach you to concentrate.  Well, at least it will eliminate all the people who can’t concentrate.  But coding is not a bad thing to do while you learn to feel.  Maybe relearn.  

I prefer reading print, even to film and other arts.  That’s partly about my age, but the point about being old is that I’ve had decades to expand my neuron plasticity.  And in my case, economic necessity forced me to take on environments and kinds of people I barely survived.  That’ll make your nest bigger in a hurry.  It might teach you to fly -- or eat worms.

In my case, teaching English taught me grammar.  English teachers don’t teach grammar anymore -- in fact, they don’t even know it themselves, nor do they know the reason for it, nor can they transform an appositive into a prepositional phrase.  They just pour out words on a wave of emotion that imitates every other wave of emotion.  I’m not saying you have to know grammar to write.  A lot of people know it intuitively, not from taking quizzes but from reading fine writing the way one intuitively learns how to ride a bicycle.  You want to do it, you want the momentum and the control, and you learn them by FEELING, not by logic or tech gimmicks.

Animal control taught me tolerance and to be alert.  Forget “beware the dog” signs -- watch for large-bore poop.  And never think you’ve seen everything now, because going through neighborhoods and knocking on doors soon reveals that some people are on the edge, some people are intensely driven to control their neighbors, and some people are dead and have been that way a while, but no one noticed.  I also benefited from sudden surges of adrenaline when under attack.  You remember that “black swan” guy?  Nassim Taleb -- not the ballerina.  Taleb says humans are MEANT to have sudden moments of danger, we're built for it, and I think he’s right.  But I cherished the moments when I was on a dog stake-out, just sitting and ruminating early in the morning while I watched for some uncatchable trespasser so I could see where he came from.

Writers will be constantly pressed to write what a monied investor or an internet audience wants to read, something spectacular that will make them pay.  Techies and investors don’t know how to do that kind of writing, and they don’t know it when they see it -- only when the stock market says so.  That’s their only yardstick and it doesn’t measure “real” writing.  In fact, whoring for the stock market will kill profit.  It’s a form of VD.  (A.B. Guthrie, Jr. always repeated “We kill what we love.”)

I’m "barebacking".  No income from publishing.  I assume you will understand what I’m talking about, judging from what I read in pop markets, via the Internet.  (You cannot buy magazines in Valier.)  What I mean is that I’m not writing for sale -- I’m only after the un-mediated experience of writing, the addition of more neurons, the ones I can feel meshing in my head so that I wake in the night suddenly understanding something -- not in words, but in endorphins or something, in my gut.  If I can’t get to that point regularly, I get very very cranky.

Particularly aggravating are the few people who still press me to write something different from what I write.  Some have not realized that I write for a global audience -- this is not a local column in a regional paper -- or they have a favorite thread on the blog and want me to get rid of all the others.  They want the time-lines to include only their own families, history as endorsement.  But I’m after the meta-trends, mutation, evolution.  I love the anthropologies and analyses and quotes from grownup books written by seasoned observers.  I do not want to cheer up, settle down, or pull in my horns.

Academics have been suffocated by corporations or have fallen so in love with post-everything theory that they have abandoned reality because it has too few syllables.  Ministers have become therapists and fund-raisers.  "Smart" guys spend their days trying to invade other people’s lives -- someone is trying to hack this computer.  If I value something, I put it on the other computer that isn’t in contact with the world.  If I value it even more, I commit it to paper.

I’ve given up the idea of preserving things for the ages -- it’s just not possible in a world where ideologues blow up ancient statues in order to prove they’re better.  But I do save some things that look as though they might be useful in my lifetime.  I’m always surprised by what they turn out to be. 

Techies are mayflies, their work obsolete overnight.  But . . . so is a lot of writing.  In my experience there are too many high-school-level Friday essays stacking up that ought to be burned.  Grading tapioca is a fool’s task.  I once tried a Seventies sort of experiment:  I gave everyone in a class an A at the beginning of the quarter to see what would happen.  The kids formed the same curve as always.  And they worried more about how they were doing.

Sometimes I think that China had it right -- the students ought to go out and plant rice instead of sitting in a desk learning other people's big ideas.  But China is infamous for sacrificing its children.  We would be, too, if the truth were known.  All those mind-rotting Saturday morning cartoons have come home to roost in our computers where they leak out into kid brains.

HEADED FOR . . . WHAT?

Jennifer Granick

Stand back!  Here come those four horses again!  This time their names are:   "Centralization, regulation, and globalization," Granick said, have wrought havoc on a space once thought of as "a world that would leave behind the shackles of age, of race, of gender, of class, even of law."

Wait!  That’s only three horses.  Read this story to figure out what the fourth horse’s name is.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/08/06/dream-internet-freedom-dying-warns-top-civil-liberties-attorney

Already this morning people are finding they are blocked from this blog.  I’m glad they tell me.  But worse is the plague of people who know what’s wrong, which to their minds is either due to my deficiencies (user error) or a lamentable lack of knowledge and superior judgement that they happen to have.  

Helpers, like the people who want to “help” me by coming over and getting all my property in shape: mowing the lawn, getting rid of the cats and books, and forcing me to buy a new wardrobe.  They never realize that conformity is a source of violence, unless they’re asked to put in a water meter or wear seat belts or stop driving drunk or make sure their kids are vaccinated.

So the people who wish me well set out to “fix” my problem with the Internet.  Except for the techies at 3Rivers who are employed on the premise that they will do this, if they can spare time from telling me how much 3Rivers appreciates me and advising me to “have a nice day.”  They tell me lots of irrelevant things in jargon I don’t understand.

If I wrote what I know about kittens, people would scream, because they haven’t known what happens to kittens and cats, how much they are metaphors for both that which is cute (but expendable) and that which is malevolent.  Terrible, daily, blood-soaked fates for many animals.  Cuteness and hiding are not very effective defenses.  The most vicious people on the planet are those who insist that human babies be conceived, carried to term and born.  At that point, they are abandoned: no help for food, shelter, and education.  Controllable. Commodities.

Medium.com is another place where I post.  It’s in a state of becoming, always adding and subtracting features, which is what the techies love, but I can never anticipate which feature will work when, so I just write my posts on iPages (which cannot be upgraded in the US -- I suppose it’s a legal loose end from when Apple bought it) or on Blogger (prairiemary.blogspot.com)  and then cut and paste.  Don’t tell anyone, because if they figure that out, they’ll block it.

They don’t understand why I write.  On Medium.com this post will appear as a “response” to one of Tim’s raving rippers which is classified as a “response” to some nice perky little high school assignment about why you should write short stories, even if they don’t sell.  I think that eventually Medium will have to begin censoring content.  I hope they censor the stupid.  Maybe they could start a parallel stream for the darker folks.  Maybe they could put a little black bat on those posts as a warning.

Tim writes from his gut, explosive and vulgar -- but real.  He says his alternative is to go crazy.  I don’t care why he writes -- I just love the energy and surrealism.  I write because I love the act of writing and I don’t care whether it sells or anyone reads it or I get praise.  People usually praise the wrong thing anyway.  They read as voyeurs and force readers into their fetish life.  You don’t think perky naive little females have a fetish life?  They ARE fetishes.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/if-you-give-a-mouse-a-xanax-1438978022  Last night I read this snarky little review of LeDoux’s new book, “Anxious”.  The reviewer missed the point.  The book is a sort of summary of what we know so far,  that addresses our unbalanced neglect of our pre-existing mammal processes.  The standing order of scholarship is based on writing, logic, and other white male European priorities. In that context, all is words and that’s our entitlement and superiority as humans, so why consider anything else? 

But LeDoux is a musician -- he can think in sound patterns and emotional valences.  Without words.  This is exactly what I’ve been working on in terms of the meaningful experiences we call “worship, ritual, ceremony, liturgy” in order to get beyond all the verbiage, which someone always wants to copyright.

LeDoux is a major scientist making genuine breakthroughs about how brains work.  He sent me a response worthy of Wittgenstein, who famously said that sometimes words are useless to convey a concept and all you can do is point.  I sent LeDoux an email to nudge him about Stephen Toulmin, who was a good pointer.  So LeDoux, who knows this, was happy to be reminded of Toulmin, and knows that I have a vague idea of Wittgenstein, so he sends me a single emoticon.  A smiley face.

My father used to sign letters with a little drawn smiley.  When I was starting out in Browning, I drew one with a scribble of curly hair and round glasses.  I did that so much that Bob made a rubber stamp of it.  He thought it was cute and funny, though rather childlike, but I was much younger than he and did what he told me, like a rubber stamper, so his assumed concepts came through in that act, a gift.

It was education in theatre and thought that revealed this invisible subtext, and that eventually ended the relationship.  Because though he was older and admired by many, I could not explain this to him -- he didn’t want to hear it.  So much of helping and generosity is a cover for control.  So much of control is a matter of denying reality, reducing it to little cartoons, using white-out to deny suffering.  I wanted a little control.  I stopped drawing that face and threw away the rubber stamp.

The irony and tragedy is that Bob was also a musician, a jazz musician at that.  But what I saw was a man wearing himself out, shrinking his brain through age, self-abuse, bad nutrition, heart attacks, little strokes, suspicion of doctors, efforts to control.  All because he needed to be famous.  And what I saw after his death was hyenas parting him out for profit, dispersing his lifework to suit their own importance, denying and distorting him for politics.  It happens to everyone, including Charlie Russell.  So why create a body of work?

Why is Joe LeDoux doing much much more than offering Xanax to mice?  If you don’t know, just go buy an anthology of short stories instead, the ones written by perky little girls who shone in high school and still think that going to a bookstore to read her writing to an audience of three, one of whom is stone deaf, means anything at all.  After all, she’s wearing pink feather handcuffs like Helen Mirren in that movie -- what was it called?  Oh, yeah:  “Love Ranch,” about a Nevada brothel.

The fourth horse is called “Who’s on Top?”

RE ORGANIZING

In the last week too much has happened for me to properly assimilate.  No biggies, just small stuff.  Think swarm.  I went "up" to the next level of Macintosh Operating System, called "Yosemite", which changed where things were, how they looked and how they interact.  There are still things I am working on that are lost in the bowels of some code-writer's labyrinthine head.  I finally found my image archive, which I need as soon as I figure out this gizmo that makes slides into jpg.  Among the other insults, I can't link readers to the best photos of the "Reynolds Creek Fire" in Glacier Park, which are pretty spectacular.  

While I was trying to figure all this out, I got complaints that emails were bouncing.  This is not trivial since I sometimes am actually expecting responses to writing.  I haven't tried to sell writing, but I do free work like reviews for environmental organizations.  It's messing with other people's lives for email to bounce.  This is a sign of a problem no one is facing:  the Internet is not dependable.  It still throws things down dark holes.  And here in Valier it's sitting on an old freaky phone substructure.  The advertising says that fiber optics are going in, all is marvelous, but the real facts are as political as anything else in Montana.  One town is perfectly happy to make sure another is not as upgraded, hamstringing their business.

Through the day I went through a sequence of techies.  They are "laminated"-- at the bottom newbies and the naive are where you begin.  They pass you up higher through the use of a work ticket, so you need to keep that number.  As I went "up" the ladder, one was cheerful, the next was guardedly grumpy;  one knew things and the next stone-walled. I write down the names.   Finally I got up to the "office" where the lady (it's always a lady) tries to soothe me and assure me that there was nothing anyone could do.  

So I added all that stuff in one email and sent it to some of the people who have been bounced.  (They knew I had a gmail account.)  The crux of the matter was that 3Rivers insisted that they had no control and that the persons who are getting bounced are on a black list, not as individuals but as an ISP for crimes like spamming.  3Rivers uses "Barracuda" to filter what comes to my email.  There are levels.  They have nothing to do with my standards.  They are set by thirty-year-olds with no life experience except keyboards and carrels.  (If I'm wrong, I'd like examples.)

I cannot reconcile this with what 3Rivers tells me.

The only way I can know that a correspondent is being bounced is if that person tells me -- but how can they tell me if my email won't accept their messages?  (Hint: my landline is in the phone book.)  The 3Rivers people couldn't grasp that fatal flaw.

Pretty soon I was at SPAMhaus.org which is a website that keeps track of who is blacklisted and provides a way to "whitelist" them.  So I asked to whitelist the ISP in question and they bluntly refused.  No reason.

I sent this info to the blacklisted people.  It turns out that the person who was most upset about being bounced knew all about it, but had never told me.  He sent a belligerent message to me which I sent on to 3Rivers.  Suddenly all was white-listed.  Unless someone is out there bouncing without my knowledge.

Except that now I have my own little black list. 

What this reveals is that the Internet is not like a phone call or snail mail.  It is not straight-forward, esp. in transit.  Not only is the provider not keeping up with the mechanical equipment, the people who are doing the planning -- like the local board of 3 Rivers are naive to the point of being out of the loop.  And there are contracting interfering bodies, not just monitoring what you say, but deciding who can contact you.

Sub-sets are making decisions about what goes where, but they are layers on layers on layers.  At the bottom is Bill Gates et al  and their original primitive assumptions about to manage information: the frame breaks down, overwhelmed, inappropriate for the reality.   You know -- blue screens and rotating beach balls.  Along the way one person noted that a friend, an "old computer hand" meaning over forty, originally learned primitive DOS years ago, and recently discovered he could easily hack major supposedly-secure computer setups, because all the safeguards were developed years AFTER DOS and no one ever went back to reform the basic assumptions.  Bandaids can be peeled off.

Already the wicked and secretive are building their own networks.  I want one for old, uncomplicated people with poor eyesight and poor control of mouses who don't want dissenters chiming in with smart-alec remarks.  I don't want more, more, more clever apps that will make dumb writing interesting by putting photos with them or making them flip or change colors or link to something I don't care about.  I don't want my spelling corrected by a machine that doesn't know what I'm talking about.  I do NOT want to be censored.

I still have a stack of unused legal pads and a box of black ink pens.  I should figure out what it costs me to send an email.  Maybe it's more expensive than stamps.  

Now THAT's a Smoke Signal.

DO YOU COUNT?

This is actually my younger brother's class.  

Since I’m 75, my elementary education preceded television.  My BS was library- and practicum-based.  (My degree was in speech/theatre.)  It was the last of the Fifties and we were seeing the very beginnings of the third-wave psych theories as well as the very beginnings of what turned into post-modern thought.  (Hayakawa’s semantics)  The Peace Corps was barely invented and I was ahead of the curve by taking a job teaching on the Blackfeet Reservation.

By the time I “retired” and came back here, I was out-of-step with everyone in many ways, a hybrid person.  Fifteen years after returning, I sit at my computer all day pretty much as I did before, but I’m more profoundly out of step.  Techies do not believe I exist and if they did, they wouldn’t care.  My demographic has no money.  

“Outlier,” “long tail,” are both statistical terms meaning that I’m in the part of a bell curve that’s at the far end where the numbers are very low.  Our society at present is based on commerce  and believes that profit comes from making a little money from a lot of people.  Even in the arts the newspapers don’t report the qualities of content anymore.  Instead they talk numbers of people who attended, money it cost, profit it made, scores, market shares.

Sunstein had hair in those days.

In 1981 I was a transcriber at the U of Chicago Law School while finishing up my degrees at the University of Chicago Divinity School.  The Law School was cutting edge technically -- had to be -- but the Div School was all about content.  At the Law School about the only profs who typed directly into their computers were Jim White and  Cass Sunstein.  Everyone else, including Scalia, I think, did some kind of workaround, like dictating. We were all connected to a massive mainframe somewhere, but everyone worked independently.  Still, we transcribers smiled when we heard the muted sounds of “Asteroids” coming from offices with closed doors.

For six years in the nineties I worked for the City of Portland doing data entry, sitting at the computer all day.  I still sit at my computer, a free-standing desktop with internet access.  It’s a “mini” Apple a little larger than a sandwich.  I keep a second one that is NEVER attached to the Internet.  I mean, there is NO physical connection.  My last computer (eMac), even when it was turned off, was connected to the Apple techies, who turned it on by remote control in the night and rummaged around making “improvements.”   Even on my connected mini, which is on all day so I can get email and do research, can be accessed by my provider, so I cut the power at night.  I shut off Blue Tooth when I began to see my neighbor's computer content.

Social sites do not interest me.  I’m connected to only a few and only so I can follow the people who are halfway between being friends and being co-workers.  I dumped Facebook when they cut off those people without notice, destroying a whole backlog of videos they had made.  Also, we have all begun to realize that social sites, including Wikipedia, are ways of building mailing lists and “hit” records that are valuable to marketers, the government, and covert operators.  No longer do we have to depend upon self-reporting to see what people care about -- we can call up the bell-curves and the bar charts to find out which porn they watch, what medicines they take, who they talk to and what about.  Even where they were at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KYugpMDXAE   This is a vid discussion.

Marketing departments love connection.  Buy one thing from Dr. Leonard and you will never get them back out of your life without some kind of confrontation.  (I ended up screaming on the phone.)  My Medicare contractor (Silverscript) is owned by a drug store chain (CVS) which began with a soft sell, a discount card, and escalated until I get regular phone calls and mailings saying that they’ve noticed that I’m not ordering my meds on time and demanding to know why not.  I write across the letter in red fibertip,  “STOP NAGGING ME!” and send it back. It does no good.  They own my butt.  Or at least my oral intake.  They assume I’m demented or I'd be compliant.

The techies of the world, the ones who grew up on game theory and have brains that know everything about systems and whatever technical terms they use, have almost no humanities background, no understanding of content or even metaphor except math.  They have no canon of shared reading, no valuing of the past.  Their morality is success-based, their empathy is for their pets.  All is innovation, more bells and whistles, more automatic spelling since they can’t do it alone.  All is templates assuming you want everyone to be your buddy so you can sell them something.  (If you don't mind piggy-backing.) I find my writing sometimes wrenched out from under my hands because it doesn’t agree with what the computer “thinks” I should do in terms of spelling or even sentence construction.  It is anti-creative with its little red and green lines.  

But worse, these sources have no intention of providing content.  They have convinced the public to do that for them.  “Send us your photos,” say the newspapers.  “Post your best writing here,” they direct.  “Twitter the news,” say the reporters, even though they know better than anyone else that their editors (who are from a different generation) will censor and reframe the reports anyway to make them appealing to the advertising bell curve.  To get news that isn’t mainstream vanilla, one must go to a foreign country.  I like The Guardian, but Al Jazeera is always interesting.

Demonized stuff is always interesting.

First Netflix just provided movies.  Then they began to want us to rate them.  Then they began to recommend movies they think I will like.  (I don’t find it useful since I respond to quality instead of genre.  They think the awards are indicators of quality, but remember that my original degree was earned with a bunch of theatre people -- I know better.)  Netflix and Amazon want us to write reviews.  We figured out how to game that in a hurry so all the reviews disappeared.  Now we have “author platforms.”  You can’t sell without confining yourself to something with edges.  

You can’t read some websites or join some orgs without allowing cookies.  If you clean off your cookies now and then, which I do, you lose function.  For a while we were assured that if we stored things in the Cloud, a massive computer warehouse someplace, they would be safe.  Now it turns out they can be searched, and if the website goes down -- maybe because of power loss or maybe because of a legal directive -- you’re down, too.  In spite of claimed redundancy.

Some "free" websites are demanding your VISA number "just in case."

Num num num num.

Automatic ads like those on blogspot respond to algorithms developed by people with no worldly knowledge, so that one's profound reflection on Buddhism gets followed by some crass ad for fundy Xianity.  One's careful essay on the forming of ministers is followed by an ad for instant ordination by mail.  It's all part of that religion blob.

But the providers give us metrics so we know exactly who, where, and how many people are reading us.  Just not their names.  (Do you watch the little maps in the right hand column?  I do.)  Best if they start comment “wars,” politely called discussions.  Whatever drives up traffic.  Now, after I've watched a movie, Netflix wants me to send recommendations to my friends.  I used to do that via email anyway, but they were paragraphs of analysis.  I resent being TOLD to do it.  It turns out that most of my friends don’t like the movies I like anyway.  We don’t watch the same way because I care about technical stuff far more than they do.  They want immersion; I want enlightenment.

Nurses want to be needed.

Very few of the people I know are as willing as I am to venture into the youth fascination with muck, darkness, sex, loud unintelligible noises.  Most adults prefer their SM with the romantic veneer of a movie like “Outlander” which they fancy to be true history of their own people.  They assume that if I watch XXX content, I must be a XXX person.  Because they don’t watch it, they assume it’s somehow corrupting, that there is nothing technical to think about.  There is no "real" content.

I have no laptop, no smart phone, no tablet, no iPod.  (Well, I think there's a little green iPod somewhere.) An occasional sign-up will DEMAND my cell phone number or prevent me from going farther.  There's no way to check "ain't got one."  In fact, some online mail order retailers will prevent me from going further if I don’t provide a physical address for mail delivery, though there is no home delivery here.  In the even smaller village thirty miles away, the streets have no names which REALLY upsets those Manhattan-based people.  At the moment you cannot use a Verizon-based cell phone in town -- only ATandT.  

On the highway the only places where a person can get cell reception are marked by turnouts and signs.  Not a lot of them around here.  GPS is not dependable.  The whole area is at the end of the bell curve.  We don’t even have fiber-optic service to our houses.  Our streets may not be paved.  The electricity surges and fades and sometimes is just missing.  We are invisible in many ways.  That’s why I like it here.  Sometimes.

One more thing, since this will mostly be read on a Sunday.  Religion is being forced into the same context of institutions and numbers: church as business, paying members, butts in the pews, number of self-identified believers, number of clergy -- all handy for designing bell curves.  Nothing about spirituality.  If you can’t number it, it doesn’t exist.  Cookies in the religious world will get you appeals for donations.  You don't have to pay for sunsets.

Light a candle?