Rules of order.
One thing I’ll never understand—the reason why some people think this sort of thing:
Midshipmen and cadets are expected to conduct themselves as gentlemen at all times—on or off the dance floor. Displays of affection on the dance floor are not tolerated, and Hop Committee members will ask those who violate courtesies to leave the hop. Members of the Hop Committee at the Coast Guard and Naval Academies are distinguished by their gold aiguillettes; at the Air Force Academy by silver aiguillettes; at West Point by red sashes. They have the authority to enforce regulations.
You will never leave your drag sitting alone, or embarrass her with boisterous conduct. Never leave her in mid-floor. If an occasion arises when you must leave, you should leave her with a group before excusing yourself. If you are not adept at certain steps, such as in the more intricate dances, you may suggest “waiting this one out.”
However, since it is the gentleman who invites the lady to dance, it is up to her to suggest that you stop. She might say, “Shall we rest a moment?” or “Please, let’s have some punch.” Otherwise, you should dance indefinitely (perhaps this is the origin of the term “dragging!”).
—or this:
At no time does any individual leave more than three cards. (For example, a husband and a wife may leave a total of six cards at one call.) You will remember that a man calls on adults, man or woman, but that a civilian woman only calls on another woman.
A military woman calls as an officer and therefore calls on the officials for whom a call is regularly required.
The following rules apply to the individual cards a husband and wife leave:
- When calling on a senior officer and his wife—2 officer cards and 1 “Mrs.” card.
- When calling on a senior officer and his wife, and his mother—3 officer cards and 2 “Mrs.” cards.
- When calling on a senior officer, his wife, his mother, and his father—3 officer cards and 2 “Mrs.” cards.
- When calling on a senior officer, his wife, his mother, his mother-in-law, and adult daughter—3 officer cards and 3 “Mrs.” cards.
When a husband and wife use “joint” calling cards (Lieutenant and Mrs. John Smith Jones), these rules apply:
- When calling on a senior officer and his wife, leave—1 officer card and 1 joint card.
- Cards in addition to joint cards are left in accordance with the general rules given for individual cards.
—or even this:
No one likes to apologize, but apologies are in order when:
- You are late at a luncheon or dinner party—or any social occasion such as a reception where the receiving line has already broken up. Then you go directly to the hostess and briefly apologize.
- The host and hostess have waited for your arrival at a luncheon or dinner party, but have not gone into the dining room. Then you apologize and tell them why you are late—and the reason must be excellent!
- You fail to keep an appointment. You should telephone or write a brief note, explaining your failure to keep the appointment—and again, the reason must be a good one.
- You cannot grant a request. In this case you must not only give your regrets, but if possible add some explanation, such as, “I’m sorry, but due to the great sentimental value attached to the object, I can’t lend it for the exhibition, etc., etc.”
- You break or damage something. You must attempt to replace the article exactly, but if you cannot, then send flowers with your calling card. You should, of course, state on the card that you are sorry concerning the mishap.
—is a necessary precondition for this:
- You have caused harm, or have hurt someone needlessly, or through carelessness. In this case you must do more than apologize—you must ask the other person’s forgiveness.
—or sufficient to ensure this:
You must always remember that the word—or signature—of a lady or gentleman is his or her bond. Therefore, think twice before you make promises. Signed to a check your signature means that you stand good for the amount indicated. Signed to the endorsement at the end of an examination it means that you subscribe to the work submitted and that it is your work. Signed to a letter it means that the ideas expressed are your own.
It is of the utmost importance that men and women in the services be honest and direct in all their dealings. Juniors can avoid a great deal of embarrassment by giving a complete but to-the-point answer in replies to questions put by their seniors.
If you are the junior and do not know or cannot give a complete or correct answer, then you should answer only as much of the question as you can without evasion or giving misinformation. An honest “I don’t know, Sir, but I will find out and let you know,” is a better answer than an indirect one that gives misinformation on which your senior may be basing an important decision. An evasive answer might seriously affect your service reputation.
Form and content; style and substance; breeding and manners; nature and nurture. —Etiquette courtesy Captain Brooks J. Harral, USN, and Oretha D. Swartz, Service Etiquette.
A few basic precautions.
Professor DeLong’s father is rattled by seeing his house on the cover of Reason magazine:
The latest issue of Reason magazine arrived in the mail, and the cover causes a jolt. It is an aerial photo of my neighborhood, with my house circled and the legend underneath: “James DeLong: They Know Where You Are!”
DeLong père ends up as sanguine about the database nation as Declan McCullagh, who wrote the article on the upside of data mining that the stunt cover publicizes. But DeLong fils isn’t so sure:
I don’t have settled (or especially informed) views on this, Dad. But I wonder if your first reaction might not have been more accurate. It takes 20 seconds to find and circle a house with a telephone book, a map, and a crayon—at $10 an hour total cost for low-wage labor, that’s six cents an address. Very few people will have an incentive to organize and analyze their data on you at that cost. Those whom you want to send you magazines every month will, but how many others. I think we do have to worry about how governments—future Stasis—will use computers. And there are additional (but far lesser) potential vulnerabilities: weaknesses of the will at the personal or household level that might be exploited. [...]
Sometimes what look like quantitative changes—the falling cost of information processing—make qualitative differences. This may or may not be one of them. But it may be time to start thinking about how one would live in a world in which every conversation (even informal ones with close family members) may be broadcast around the world.
All of which is really just an excuse to cut ’n’ past the lyrics to a delightful song by Momus, written in the headier, happier days of 1997, on this very topic. Ladies and gentlemen, from the exquisite Ping Pong: “The Age of Information.”
This is a public service announcement.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are now entering
The age of information
It’s perfectly safe
If we all take a few basic precautions
May I make some observations?
Axiom 1 for the world we’ve begun:
Your reputation used to depend on
What you concealed
Now it depends on what you reveal
The age of secretive mandarins who creep on heels of tact
Is dead: we are all players now in the great game of fact instead
So since you can’t keep your cards to your chest
I’d suggest you think a few moves ahead
As one does when playing a game of chess
Axiom 2 to make the world new:
Paranoia’s simply a word for seeing things as they are
Act as you wish to be seen to act
Or leave for some other star
Somebody is prying through your files, probably
Somebody’s hand is in your tin of Netscape magic cookies
But relax:
If you’re an interesting person
Morally good in your acts
You have nothing to fear from facts
Axiom 3 for transparency:
In the age of information the only way to hide facts
Is with interpretations
There is no way to stop the free exchange
Of idle speculations
In the days before communication
Privacy meant staying at home
Sitting in the dark with the curtains shut
Unsure whether to answer the phone
But these are different times, now the bottom line
Is that everyone should prepare to be known
Most of your friends will still like you fine
X said to Y what A said to B
B wrote an email and sent it to me
I showed C and C wrote to A:
Flaming World War III
Cut, paste, forward, copy
CC, go with the flow
Our ambition should be to love what we finally know
Or, if it proves unloveable, simply to go
Axiom 4 for this world I adore:
Our loyalties should shift in view according to what we know
And who we are speaking to
Once I was loyal to you, and prepared to be against information
Now I am loyal to information, maybe I’m disloyal to you
My loyalty becomes more complex and cubist
With every new fact I learn
It depends who I’m speaking to
And who they speak to in turn
Axiom 5 for information workers who wish to stay alive:
Supply, never withhold, the information requested
With total disregard for interests personal and vested
Chinese whispers was an analogue game
Where the signal degraded from brain to brain
Digital whispers is the same in reverse
The word we spread gets better, not worse
X said to Y what A said to B
B wrote an email and sent it to me
I showed C and C wrote to A:
Flaming World War III
Cut, paste, forward, copy
CC, go with the flow
Our ambition should be to love what we finally know
Or, if it proves unloveable, simply to go
Crying in the Wind, by Harold Applebaum.
The soldiers pass, the leaders pass, and war
Becomes a string of dates and foreign names
To feed the young for twenty years. Once more
The tide recedes and man resumes his games
Of blindman’s bluff, the savage make-believe
Of progress, peaceful tongue in cheek. Once more
The rich will prosper and the poor conceive
As each contributes to the common war.
The wise will clamor, as they always do
With warning, reason, truth and sense, but vain
As crying in the wind. A precious few
Will reach the mountains by the time the rain
Begins, and launch their frantic arks to find
That floods are endless and the doves are blind.
Spinooti found it, tucked inside an old Bible.
Mollified, and yet.
Just because I feel some sort of obligation or something: one more Movable Type 3.0 post. —They’ve spoken, after all, and addressed a few of the concerns raised (rather vociferously) over the past couple of days:
- They’ve stripped the “one CPU” limit from the license.
- They count an author (the total number of which is now limited) as anyone who’s logged in within the past 90 days.
- They count a weblog (the total number of which is now limited) as a site visible at a single main URL; therefore, sideblogs set up as “separate” blogs with the software don’t count toward this total.
- They now offer Personal Edition add-ons, which will allow group blogs to purchase a somewhat cheaper personal license and add additional authors at $9.95 a pop.
This mollifies me not a little. I can still run it for free, since I now have “two” blogs, and not “five,” and it’s not inconceivable that I’d scrape together the 70 bucks necessary to upgrade to fully fledged. And the group blogs don’t have to buy the commercial license and trim their mastheads to upgrade the software they’ve been using; even sociology professors and natural philosophers should be able to pony up $12 or $13 a head to blog, right? (Though there’s a quirk in the special pricing: it’s cheaper to buy the middle license for 10 authors and 10 blogs and add on from there, than it is to buy the third license at 13 and 13. That quirk will no longer obtain in the regular pricing.)
But: the personal license at its regular price of 100 bucks is still 30 bucks more than 70, and I’m not necessarily going to upgrade right away. And you still have to be registered with TypeKey to download a free version. And—well, it’s weird. Jay Allen’s point is worth considering: this is called, after all, a “Developer’s Release”; it’s primarily intended for developers to get in early and start hacking together their third-party plug-ins, updating and upgrading to work with 3.0. A general release (it’s then theorized) of 3.0 is still to come. A fine point, but there’s some stuff left out of the equation: I, after all, am not a developer. I’ve already downloaded MT 2.661, so I can ride it out until this (as yet unacknowledged, mind) general release. But if I were just coming into this blogging game, and had heard MT was teh hella best, and went to get the program, I could download the Developer’s Release, or I could—
What?
TypePad, probably. —Not to climb to far out on a limb, but in the absence of clear communications, theory will fester: I think they’re trying to haul their income from one stream bed into another, roomier one with raw muscle power. Little blogs like mine ought to end up on TypePad; power users and “enterprise” folks can beef up the bottom line; de facto resellers like the fine folks over at White Rose can pay up or fall by the wayside. And this is SixApart’s prerogative. (Given the “oh you whining free-software hippies, it’s only 60 bucks for a cab ride, why don’t you just suck it up, you ungrateful internet freeloaders” rhetoric that’s spewing from some quarters, one feels it’s de rigueur to include a standard disclaimer with every post on the subject: “In our wondrous capitalist economy, a software company may charge whatever it bloody well feels like for its proprietary product,” or words to that effect. Also: Saddam is evil; the killing of Nick Berg was deplorable; and courage! Bush is a noodle.) But hauling rather than weaning an income stream from here to there is by its nature disruptive, and Jesus, I’m about to descend into punditry.
Fuck it. I don’t want TypePad; I like Movable Type; I’m not happy about paying $100 for it; there are alternatives out there; I’m going to start shopping around (WordPress and Textpattern, yes, and thanks for the recommendations). And that’s it; I’m spent.
MT 3.0.
Oh, hey, guess I’m sticking with MovableType 2.661 for a bit. —It’s not that I begrudge them their lucre and it’s not that I think software must (necessarily) be free or something like that; it’s just that I’m a cheap bastard. I mean, Jesus H. Christ in a jumped-up sidecar, the price breaks: $69.95 is steep enough, but that’s the introductory price. It jumps to $99.95 at some point after that. —It is still available for free, yes, but you’re limited to three blogs off one installation, and it only looks like I have two blogs running in MT: I actually have five, since three feed sideblogs to the other two.
I think maybe it’s time to bite the bullet and climb under the Textpattern hood to see what’s what.
And you know, the price breaks make even less sense when you consider the ever-growing popularity—and visibility—of group blogs.
Just to expand on the above point: two of the most popular and visible standard-bearers in the ever-growing trend toward group blogs are Crooked Timber and the Panda’s Thumb. Both of them run on MT. Both of them now face the following choice:
- stick with MT 2.661 until the cows come home,
- port their blogging and archives over to a different system, or
- pay $600 now, or $700 later, for software they’ve been using for free, or supporting with donations—
- and even then, the Panda’s Thumb would have to cut loose five authors to fit the top-end restriction. (Should they really be forced to get that Darwinian?)
Yes, SixApart is trying to account for the big companies that are using MT for things quite other than blogging, and that’s fine, go team! But the way they’ve gone about it—distinguishing personal from commercial uses primarily by the number of authors and blogs involved—leaves a big fat slice of their enthusiastic amateur base in the dust. Their prerogative; then, you can toss the baby with the bathwater whenever you want, so long as no literal baby is involved. There’s not a great alternative blogging tool (that I know of) which allows multiple blogs and multiple authors with such ease. Yet. —There will be, soon enough.
Oh, hey, more! Shelley over at Burningbird compiles a list of reasons why, even if I did only have three blogs, I couldn’t use the free MT 3.0: as it currently stands, you have to be registered with TypeKey to download it (which isn’t a prospect that thrills me), and you’re only allowed one installation on one CPU—and I have no idea how that fits with my hosting company. More phone calls and emails with technical support would be called for, with the possibility that I’d have to move everything elsewhere anyway (after further calls with their technical support, etc. etc.). Why hassle? My path is clear: 2.661 > some other solution. What fun!
One last update, and then I’m putting this topic to bed: Dean Peters has some very thoughtful things to say on why, exactly, there’s been such an uproar, and sketches an alternate pricing plan that would have made nary a ripple with me, at least (and not just because it’s cheaper, peanut gallery).
What part of “no” do they not understand?
NORTH: Alan—Alan, for 13 or 14 days now, all we have seen on the front pages of America’s newspapers is a group of obviously twisted young people with leashes and weird sex acts, the kind of thing that you might find on any college campus nowadays, being perpetrated by people in uniform.
—a half dozen of the other.
To which the Pentagon official replied, “You mean the six morons who lost the war?”
—“Iraqi Prisoner Abuse May Undermine War on Terror,” Tom Regan.
Now, really. I know things got a little feisty under Clinton, what with hardly veiled threats from sitting senators, but is this how one ought to refer to Wolfowitz and Feith, Rumsfeld and Cheney, Rice and Bush?
Remember: the military ultimately serves civilian masters. We ask that they serve us; they do what we require. There’s no other way a military force can work in a civil democracy.
A little respect, please.
Maybe you had to be there?
So Morah got shot, see, and ended up dying in Venice’s arms, except it wasn’t really like you’re thinking, they’d just met, and anyway Morah wasn’t really dead, she ended up ghosting into Venice’s head, and maybe it’s because Venice is a powerful yet naïve telepath or maybe it’s because Morah is really a body-hopper and she’s been lying to us all this time, I mean, she is an agent for the Resistance, but I at least am predisposed to trust her if not for the best of reasons, but we’ll get to that, the important thing being that Morah’s now a matrix of data set askew inside Venice’s head, where she can be called up in secret with subvocal whispers, Venice’s own pocket oracle, but nothing more than that really, until Venice interfaced with that ancient computer and something happened which pretty much woke Morah back up again, so she wasn’t just a matrix of information, she was, you know, self aware, and she’d get up in the middle of the night and go walkabout in Venice’s body, which really freaked me out, since I was the Guard, and Venice was my charge, but a couple of tense conversations at gunpoint and we worked it all out because maybe I’m big and maybe I’m stupid and I don’t really remember all that much about myself at all which is why it was Burhan who had to come up with a name for me but I’m not the sort of person to go shooting at just anything that moves unless there’s drugs involved but that’s another story, anyway, after the bit with the baths and the tropical socks and the junkyard SATs which I’ll gloss over we ended up in the city that was under seige from the Madlands which are underneath, except when the Madlands beseige your city it looks a lot more like somebody’s trying to set up an embassy, unless of course the Nemesis of the folks from the Madlands is trying to scotch the whole thing by dressing up in the bodies of the city’s ruling class and working mischief after mischief, and there was the musicbox bomb that Burhan had to defuse, and I keep forgetting that K’ia has the tone plate from that bomb wrapped up in something soft and stuffed at the bottom of her pack, because one of these days she wants to get it up to one of the city ships that fly across the sky and ring it and see what it happens, but I really don’t want to think about that, I’ve got enough to worry about, see, because while we were sorting out the whole Nemesis-necromancer thing I shot the Zoxone of the folks from the Madlands and it wasn’t by accident, and I know I said I don’t shoot just anything that moves, I’m actually very careful about that sort of thing, because before I was a guard I was a soldier, and that sort of thing is what I know how to do and it’s important to do what you know how to do well, but let’s make this long story shorter than it is by leaving out the stuff with the soldiers who were just like me and who let me stand a watch or two at the emergency embassy, which was nice, but the point is at the end of it all the city was in chaos but the castle was still standing and the folks from the Madlands were pretty much okay and the Nemesis was dead dead dead, and we weren’t, only everybody else said Morah was still dead, because she was in Venice’s head and nowhere else, except I didn’t think she was dead, because you can’t talk to dead people, you know, and we’d been talking some when I was standing guard and nobody else was awake, and see the thing is Venice thought maybe the Nemesis wasn’t dead either, and Timbuk who was the one who thought maybe Morah was really a body-hopper also didn’t think the Nemesis was dead, or maybe he was, but see, nobody could talk to the Nemesis, right, so I mean he pretty much had to be dead, was what I thought, and anyway we were headed off elsewhere, we found the Resistance and Morah didn’t want to talk to them since she thought she was dead, too, and there was some more stuff with red dust and giant metal bugs and an ancient city, and the important thing here aside from the fact that we did in the end manage to stop the red dust from swallowing pretty much the entire world is that in the course of fighting off an attack by the soldiers from one of the city ships that fly across the sky I shot one of the soldiers who was doing something to the ancient computer we’d found except Timbuk really wanted him alive and Venice poured one of her potions on him and he wasn’t dead so much anymore except that inside the interface space where Morah didn’t look like she was in Venice’s head because I think when we were in that interface space nobody was in anybody’s head, anyway, Morah was able to race the soldier back to his body and beat him to it and now she had a body and Venice didn’t have anybody in her head except herself and the soldier was dead dead dead, except he was a matrix of data still fixed in his head which was now Morah’s head or at least the head where she was living for the moment, except when we were up at the edge of the Madlands while the rest of them were down inside the Madlands trying to make a copy of a dying village something happened which pretty much woke the soldier back up again, only it turned out that I was the only one who could talk to him, and even though I could see him and get him to feed the gorzah and follow him places where he’d been it turned out that he was in my head now, and I think it was because the Madlands made it happen, I mean I don’t think Morah pushed him, and I did feel responsible because I had shot him, you know, and he didn’t remember where he’d come from, like me, and he wanted to get back there anyway, like I did, but the sort of soldier he’d been had nothing to do with the sort of soldier I’d been, I mean, there’s a reason there’s a Resistance, and anyway I didn’t like him very much, he was supercilious and he called me his jailer like it was my fault, and so it was best for all concerned if we just got him the hell out, even if we didn’t have a body to put him into, because we’d left Morah’s behind way back at the beginning when she got shot and everybody was sure she was dead, so we decided to go deeper down into the Madlands, where Timbuk could lead us maybe to somebody who could maybe help, but Venice, who was pretty sure the Nemsis wasn’t dead, was also pretty sure that the thing I was talking to wasn’t the soldier, but was, instead, the Nemesis, only how on earth could the Nemesis have gotten into my head, you know, it doesn’t make any sense, but anyway we went down into the brightly colored copy of the village that wasn’t dying anymore and from there we got into a boat and we let it take us to the place where the windmills are, because a windmill was drawn on the plaque that we picked at random and stuck into the little frame on the back of the boat, because that’s how the Madlands are, and that’s why they’re down there and the city ships full of soldiers are up there, but anyway we were following the path because it’s very important not to get distracted or rock the boat and you must never, ever leave the path once you’re on it, and when we got to the end of this particular path Timbuk would get word to the folks we’d met earlier, who had been trying to open an embassy to that city, and whose Nemesis we’d killed until he was dead (dead dead), and because of that their Zoxone would come to us and help get the soldier out of my head, only we’d stopped to rest and I said the soldier’s name which I think was the name he’d had before he became a soldier, and he appeared, and everybody could see him now, because we were in the Madlands, which is like I think when we were in the interface space, only we all had our bodies with us, even him, and so K’ia who knows about smells and tastes and blood decided to do an experiment to see if she could tell the difference between me and him since we both smelled the same to her, even though Timbuk who knew the most about the Madlands didn’t think this was such a good idea, but he’s not the sort of person to leap in and say no, he just shook his head, and maybe he would have burned an orange duck again, but Venice, you remember, thought that it was really the Nemesis who was pretending to be the soldier while he bided his time and healed from what we’d done to him back in the city that was being beseiged, and she thought the best way to figure this out for sure (since Nemeses lie if you aren’t careful) would be to surprise him, and so while K’ia was tasting our blood and surrounded by silvery insects and while I was standing there shivering and while Burhan was holding his dog and while Timbuk was tut-tutting the whole thing and while the soldier was standing there shivering Venice drew the Nemesis’s sigil on a piece of paper and when she was finished she showed it to the soldier and the drawing grew claws and leaped after him and they both disappeared into me, because that’s how the Madlands are, and it doesn’t matter anymore if that’s the soldier or the Nemesis and it doesn’t matter if Venice is right or if K’ia is right because it’s damn well the Nemesis in there now and he’s only going to get stronger because a Nemesis draws strength from its nemesand and the Zoxone is on her way—
All of which and more is why I gasped and leaped up from the couch, and it’s why John grinned sheepishly and Jenn put down her pencil and Charles shook his head with that smile and Dawn got that look and Becca outright laughed, because when six different people take up different threads of plot and character like that and under loose direction manage to drop something that big and patterned and meaningful into place without quite knowing that’s what we’d been doing right up until the last minute when it was too late and it all snicked into place, well, it’s as close to magic as I think I’m ever going to get, and it’s why gaming is such an intoxicating pasttime, even if it took us over a year to get this far. —But it’s also why that intoxication is so hard to get across to anybody else, you know? Or maybe you can extrapolate.
You are what you’ve eaten.
More and better elsewhere, and once again I’m tempted to settle down with that translation of Thomas Browne’s Urne Buriall. (How hard could it be to learn Spanish at this stage in the game? And then Browne?)
—At the very least, could somebody bum-rush Anon? Let ’em sleep it off in the gutter.
Me am teh best EVAR! LOL
“Don Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had,” said Vice President Dick Cheney. “People ought to get off his case and let him do his job.” He “said” this in a prepared statement. It wasn’t shot from the hip at a pool reporter while walking and talking at a Sorkinian clip. He had some time to think about it, is my point, and take into account the stories so far:
They first learned about this when the “courageous” soldier took the pictures to his superiors. And the pictures were all “personal.”
But then stories came out that the pictures were ordered by MI for “intimidation” purposes.
And the ICRC reported it had told the Admin. about these problems months ago.
And it was limited to a handful of “bad apples.” Except the same thing happened in Afghanistan.
And the photos were staged, not “snapshots.”
And they knew something was up in November, but they fixed it. But they were surprised by the allegations in January.
But no one knew about it. But everyone knew about it, because there was a breakdown in command.
But there was no breakdown. And the Geneva Convention has always applied.
Except when it hasn’t.
And we’ve always followed it. Except when we didn’t.
And we don’t abuse prisoners. Except when we do. It’s not “American.” Except it is expressly sanctioned by military regulations. Except it can only be sanctioned by the SoD, because Rumsfeld keeps tight rein on everything.
Except he doesn’t. Because this was authorized in Iraq, not in Washington. Except it couldn’t have been, because Rummy runs a tight ship.
Except he didn’t know. But don’t call it “plausible deniability.” Because there’s a chain of command.
Except Rumsfeld doesn’t know what it is. He only knows about the PR campaign he’s been conducting since these photos went public.
But he isn’t lying. He just doesn’t know anything.
But it’s okay. Because he’s doing a great job.
Even though everything is a shambles.
—We said; they said. I guess, well, shucks. It all remains to be seen, doesn’t it?
(Oh. One last thing: this just doesn’t wash, because it’s pretty much an astoundingly stupid way to deal with narrow roads and macho bus drivers. Thank you. That is all.)
Rage.
At the moment. The current juncture. This place where we’ve found ourselves. My fingers get all tangled up in the keys and when I pound the desk in frustration it makes an ominous croak. I can speak well enough, though I have to make an effort to keep my voice down and all my jokes are brittle and if I’ve snapped at you in the past few days, it’s not your fault, and I am sorry. Sometimes my hands curl into fists when I’m not looking. It’s not that I really want to hit anybody because I’ve never hit anybody in my life but I want to hit somebody only that wouldn’t do any good, not any good at all. And it’s not the people who did the things they’ve done that I want to hit. It’s the people who say that what was done was okay, was fine, was what we’d all do anyway, was the American way, was gay feminist pornography, was what has to be done to get anywhere in this world, was nothing more than they deserved, was no big deal, was free speech. And I want to call them monsters because they are saying monstrous things but I can’t call them monsters. I can’t hit them. I can’t snap a baton against the backs of their knees and force them to kneel in fear before a snarling dog for the horrible things they’ve said, that they pretend I ought to believe. I can’t put hoods over their heads to shut them up. I can’t hit them. I can’t pretend I am better than this by pretending they are less than human because that’s how we get into these messes in the first place. But it is up to us to do something: God is away on business, and reason’s been asleep for four years or more, and every time they open their mouths monsters leap from their tongues and, and I can’t keep up, my arms won’t reach. Somebody’s locked up all the soapboxes. And just when I need my words the most to let the 300 or so people who come by here know that I feel just as outraged as they do themselves—
I am ashamed. I am appalled. I can’t countenance a country that happily lets the likes of Rush Limbaugh set the moral tone, and cheerfully pretends that James Inhofe adequately represents them. I can’t imagine a country that would so blithely condone the manifest incompetency of the people who claim to govern us. I can’t understand why we aren’t in the streets right now with torches and pitchforks, howling.
(Or maybe hide under the covers with my books and my cats and my wife until it all Goes Away in November when we vote them all out of office and we wake up from this horrible dream and everyone understands it was all a terrible misunderstanding and all the dead people stand up smiling and they apologize sweetly for playing such an awful trick on us but it’s over now and then there is a parade.)
My heart races sometimes and the corners of my eyes get wet and I feel that choke in the back of my throat and I wonder why until I remember and then my stomach drops. My hands curl into fists when I’m not looking but there are no holes in the wall. Yet.
Context.
I’m getting barraged by search requests for Limbaugh + “blow off some steam.” And I know what they’re looking for. But see: there’s two basic reasons why someone might Google up that horror.
I wish to God I knew which was in the lead.
—Bonus! For those of us still with heads atop our necks, here’s the kicker designed to blow them up once and for all. Ready? No, seriously. You have to fasten your seatbelts and hold onto your hats and kiss your socks goodbye on this one, because you won’t be picking them up until sometime next week. So when I say ready, I mean you best be motherfuckin’ ready, you hear me? Because I’m about to let World o’ Crap call George Neumayr up to the mike, and when he opens his mouth, there’s no turning back. Here he comes. Last chance. Are. You. Ready?
And why is the behavior depicted in the photos so appalling to liberals? If the behavior had been voluntary, liberals would call it free speech.
No one truly sensitive can hurt another human being.
I stood, stand, alone.
Hee. —Oh, one can, if one is forced, retreat behind the subtitle of what one is about (Imagining Fowles); one can point out that to dismiss an author utterly on the basis of their adolescent journals is as wrong-headed as to dismiss a neighborhood utterly because the houses are peeling and the children playing in the street are dirty; one should perhaps note that The Magus, for instance, isn’t at all important or good or even worthwhile for the reasons the book jacket says (then, what book is? —It would take too long to get into: suffice it to say that the Magus is only the first of the Major Arcana), and Fowles was an adolescent for such a terribly long time; even so, he is the sort of author that the world is better off having had.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a motherload of schadenfreude in Ian Sansom’s review of John Fowles: The Journals (and, almost incidentally, Eileen Warburton’s John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds)—
Basically, according to Fowles, everyone else is totally crap: useless, rubbish, a waste of time and not worth bothering about. He starts with his parents, as is traditional, and moves on from there. The parent-hate stuff is more Mole than Freud – not so much traumatising primal scene as terribly noisy hoovering. They tidy up, your mum and dad. ‘Spasm of hate. Trying to listen to Mozart 465 Quartet, when M[other] seems, almost deliberately, to spoil it.’ Every schoolboy knows that parents have no taste, but Fowles remains a pitiless adolescent into adulthood. ‘A new view on my parents, which embraces all their faults – or better, the qualities they lack. They have no sense of style. They can’t tell a stylish jug from a pretty jug, they don’t feel the style of things, of a book, of a piece of music, of a meal, of a flavouring, of life.’ ‘For some time,’ he concludes, ‘I feel willingly that I could like killing them.’ He does his best to analyse his parents’ apparent failings, compared to his own obvious excellence, and this is what he comes up with: ‘The difference in environmental norms accounts for much – a boarding-school, an officers’ mess, a university, all have led me into a much wider plane than 25 rather introvert years in the same quiet household, where the class has slipped.’ All that education didn’t go to waste, then. His poor sister, who is younger than him and who can therefore never catch up, comes off even worse: ‘Hazel is an interesting test-object for egotism. Financially it is to my benefit that she should not exist . . . She merely seems like a small pet.’
Nicholas Urfe, it seems, learned nothing. —Via The Minor Fall, The Major Lift.
Comics, juxtaposed.
First, there’s Bill Mudron doing Pan.
Then, there’s Chris Baldwin filling in for the Spouse on Dicebox.
Because, you see, having finished Chapter 3, she’s off channeling Edward Gorey as she fills in for Dylan Meconis on Bite Me!
And while you’re over at Girlamatic, you might want to pop in on the debut of Barry Deutsch’s Hereville.
And, heck, finish it off with the photos snapped by Winter and Sky McCloud of their dad goofing around with 24-hour cartoonists up and down the lower half of California.
Ignoring for the moment that neither Sky nor Winter
nor Scott nor Ivy is visible in the sample photo above.
The third way.
Empiricism, p-idealism, and Islamism, which is somehow neither: heck, even John Fowles saw the wisdom of Den Beste, 16 years and an ocean away—
It took me many years to realize the great abyss between the French and English traditions of language use, or rhetoric: the pervasive influence of the metaphorical on the first, and of the literal on the second; life perceived through the intellect, through forms and concepts, and life perceived (more or less) as it appears; words as pure algebra, words as practical and Euclidean; as carefully bred garden pansies and as, in Lévi-Strauss’s pun, wild heart’s-ease. No doubt expert comparative linguists will cry in outrage at such a crude distinction, and I must, if I am forced, retreat behind the subtitle of this book [Studies in Anglo-French Cultural Relations: Imagining France]. Such an abyss, wrong though I may be to suppose it, forms very much a part of my own imagined France.
Or, well, maybe not. Fowles has kept in mind that old chestnut about fighting monsters and gazing into abysses and what that does to the fighter and the gazer; and, much as we (O, that royal, unholy “we”) have kept up the torture rooms and the rape rooms and maybe even God help us the mass graves we so righteously went in to wipe from the face of the earth, well: it’s left to any astute-enough observer of the current Yankee Zeitgeist to determine which side is in the end the more likely to use words as algebra; whose X is truly able to mean whatever they want it to mean at the time. (Which necessarily excludes those observers who’ve somehow miscast themselves as Matt Damon, holding Minnie Driver’s phone number up against the window and yelling “How do you like these apples!” to a bar full of Harvard smartypants. —He later dumped her on one of those late-night talk shows. Broke her heart. I read about it in one of the glossier magazines.)
Man, just think: if Derrida had gotten up in front of the country and declaimed, “I did not have sex with that woman”...
Empiricism, p-idealism, an exquisitely tailored Manichean mirror-dream—I want a different third way. Rabe‘a Al-Adawiyah will do for a start, a Sufi mystic who did Diogenes one better: she wandered the streets with a torch and a bucket of water, to burn the gates of heaven and douse the fires of hell, so she could see who truly loved God for God. “Oh my Lord,” she said, “if I worship you for fear of your hellfire then throw me in it, and if I worship you in greed for your heaven then forbid me from having it, and if I am worshipping you for your generous face then forbid me not from seeing you.” And it may seem to those who squint that we’re right back where we started, and maybe the gates of heaven are daily polished by the p-idealists, and it’s those Others in the mirror that stoke the fires of hell, and maybe there’s something joyously empirical to blindly feeling the face of God with our fingers, but Rabe‘a sees what Den Beste misses, if I may be so blasphemous: the whole point of a trialectic is to position yourself just so, smiling sweetly, saying, “Let’s you and him fight.”
Urban remedies.
Oh, hey, Mark Lakeman is running for City Council.
Boy, I’ve been paying attention to local politics.
This is another Anodyne article. The footer at the bottom of the clipping I’ve got says April 1997, which means the damn thing was written seven years ago. It’s a piece I’m more happy with than not from back in that particular day, even if me-then glares at how me-now wants to smooth out the more embarrassing hyperbole. It’s about Mark Lakeman and the T-Horse and the Moonday T-Hows and Intersection Repair and City Repair and it’s about why I’m going to vote for Mark Lakeman, though it might not be why you’d vote for him. Or against him. And I guess beyond noting that while Hands Around Portland didn’t quite work (for at least the idea of completing an actual circle, much like Hands Across America failed to make it actually across), Dignity Village is working (for at least the idea of doing something concrete to help the homeless), and that’s the more important of the two, you ask me, well, beyond noting that, I’ll just get out of the way. —Oh, yeah: Juliana Tobón took some photos, which I’d show you if I could, but hey, you know: seven years.
Whether you blame it on disrespect for family values or rampant corporate greed, all of us here in fin de siècle America agree on one thing: life sucks. Our problems are legion and getting worse, and any conceivable solution seems hopelessly out of reach. It would have to do so much, speak to so many people, regardless of age or race or class or sexual preference or crackpot creed. It’s all too big, too abstract, too much—how can we find a solution when we can’t even agree on the problems?
Mark Lakeman believes he has a solution—and a lot of people are starting to agree with him.
The first part of the solution looks pretty damn ungainly as it negotiates the narrow paths of Couch Park at night. It’s a blue Toyota pickup truck, well-used, with a camper over the bed and an immense heap of sticks and plastic sheeting rolled up on top. It settles in the darkest corner of the park, as far as possible from the poisonous pink sodium-vapor lights. People gather round. Some of them start unloading the truck, breaking that pile of plastic and sticks into separate bundles; some of them are bringing food, trays of desserts, pots of chai and tea; some of them are standing around scratching their heads.
Those bundles, once unrolled and hefted up, attached with ties and braced with struts, become high, wide awnings, one each for the front, back, both sides. The plastic sheeting, unfurled, catches the light, looking like the paper wings of a Leonardo da Vinci glider.
“It’s a butterfly,” says one of the head-scratchers suddenly. He grins.
Rugs are spread beneath the wings, and pillows, an assortment of thrift-store styles and colors. Candles are lit and hung from the struts. Two people climb in the back of the truck and busy themselves with cups and plates. “The T-Horse is open!” they call, and desserts and cups of tea start issuing forth, all for free. People flop on the pillows, chatty, friendly, smiling. Kids and dogs play on the fringes. Someone starts to play a drum or two.
“What is this?” more than one person is asking, unsatisfied with the poetry of the butterfly answer. Well—it’s a mobile café, a free space for the people of the neighborhood to gather, a place for them to meet and hang out for the night; putting it simply, it’s a T-Horse.
It’s also a seed, an activator, a catalyst; a means to an end. It’s the fourth T-Hows.
Mark Lakeman doesn’t want to be called an architect, though it runs in his veins. His father is Richard Lakeman, the first head of Portland’s Planning Bureau, who fought for Waterfront Park and Pioneer Square; his mother is Sandra Davis Lakeman, a design instructor and architectural historian whose specialty is light and its interplay with public space. Lakeman himself trained as a corporate architect, though he never got his license. “I left in protest,” he says. “I didn’t want to get my license. I don’t want the sanction of an organization that puts technology over history and culture.”
He was utterly disheartened by a sordid little incident involving a local construction firm, a major building, the EPA, and hidden barrels of sludge (the sort of thing that’s far more common than we want to admit). He knocked about for a time, traveling to Europe to help his mother with a study of the piazzas of Italian hill towns, seeing ancient architecture, buildings that were works of art, that expressed something.
Returning to the States, he took a long hard look at the immense sculptural things he’d been trained to build. He didn’t like what he saw.
“Look at this,” he says, pointing to a picture of a skyscraper. “This is trying to say aspire, be all you can be—but at the top of every skyscraper is nothing but a mechanical system. What is that saying? The only thing being expressed here is ‘growth’.”
Something fundamental has gone wrong in how we build for ourselves, and Lakeman set out to look for answers. His search eventually took him all the way back to the beginnings of building, and of human community—the Hach Wynik, quite possibly the last unassimilated indigenous people left in North America.
In 1994, Lakeman spent two and a half months living in a village of approximately 120 Hach Wynik deep in what little remains of the Lacandon rain forest, on the border between Mexico and Guatemala. He ostensibly went in to conduct an anthropological study through painting; he never painted a stroke. Instead he spent all his time learning, or rather unlearning—everything about what makes family, community, human interaction, about what is and isn’t possible. He describes the process as “unmaking,” and still finds the whole experience somewhat distant, jumbled, hard to lay out—but it all crystallized around an otherwise ordinary conversation one day in the forest when his companion reached out, casually, and with one hand performed a neat and intricate little dance with a butterfly, then, just as casually, let it go.
Something had happened which isn’t supposed to happen, call it magic or luck or delusion or what you will—but the effects were very real. “I felt a profound physiological crisis, like hitting a computer with a virus. Seeing something so beautiful, and so profound… I’d have given everything I knew to have that rapport with nature.”
Coming out of the forest, he spent some time trying to reconcile what he’d learned with what he thought he knew, what he calls “two different ways of seeing.” He spent some time on a porch in San Pedro, a town on the shores of Lake Atitlan, in Guatemala, and, trying to recapture some of the community he’d felt in the forest, he began to leave his cookstove going 24 hours a day, offering up food and drink and space to whomever was passing by.
The first T-Hows was born.
“That was the remaking process,” says Lakeman. “I discovered I enjoyed facilitating gathering. And I began to see food and drink as a means of pulling people together.”
He brought this principle with him when he returned to Portland, setting up in a tent in a friend’s backyard in Northeast Portland. This second T-Hows served about 25 people a night and ran through August and September of 1995—but there was something more to be done, something bigger, something better, something to reach out to more people.
The Moonday T-Hows (to give it its full name) is slowly but surely entering the mythic landscape of Portland. Built during the winter of 1995 out of recycled doors and windows, plastic sheeting, and stormfall, it sounded for all the world like a post-apocalyptic shack. It was, instead, a lovingly crafted tea house, built around and through the trees on a yard at the corner of SE 9th and Sherrett. Divided inside into ten different spaces, decorated by ten different artists around themes like the Heart, the Soul, the Best Friend’s Stage, and Grandmother’s Porch, the third T-Hows opened on March 21, 1996, and every Monday thereafter served up a potluck. Though designed to hold 80 people, it drew at first only curious neighbors—but word of mouth began to spread. By the middle of the summer, when the band Gypsy Caravan put on an impromptu concert, two or three hundred people spilled onto the streets, dancing. Over five hundred people came to its last night, August 19, when it was dismantled.
Contrary to previous reports, no small-minded city bureaucrat reluctantly or otherwise ordered the T-Hows destroyed. There were some concerns over lack of insurance, and over the use of recycled materials in its construction (a strict regulatory no-no, by the way), but the city was supportive from the start, and issued a 6-month temporary permit, though a full year could have been theirs for the asking. It wasn’t necessary. The original idea had always been to last only from March 21 to September 21, from equinox to equinox, and when the T-Hows came down on August 19, it was, quite simply, because its time had come, a little earlier than foreseen. “It had matured,” in Lakeman’s words. It, too, was a seed, a catalyst, a means to an end.
Towards what end, though? What are these seeds trying to grow?
For a glimpse, head back to SE 9th and Sherrett.
Near the end of last summer, as the T-Hows was drawing to a close, Lakeman attached a simple string compass to the manhole in the center of the intersection and drew a big circle cutting across all four corners. He then asked the property owners if he could plant flowers in the grass berms along that circle, and three of the four agreed. Lakeman built a small tea station on one corner, to keep the spirit of the T-Hows alive, and supplied it with cups, bags, and thermoses of hot water kept filled at all hours of the day and night. A produce stand, for surplus vegetables from neighborhood gardens, and a chalk station soon followed, all built with the help of neighborhood kids, all with the blessing of the corner property owners. (The fourth eventually came around, once he saw what was happening.)
He began doing these things out of an inchoate desire to mark the neighborhood in some fashion—“I really don’t understand how it started,” he says—but Lakeman soon realized what he was trying to do was fashion a piazza from a common residential intersection.
He called it a piazza, but he could have called it a square, a commons, a green, a forum, a plaza. Throughout the world, wherever people build neighborhoods for themselves, where two paths meet, something happens. A place where people meet, converse, sit and enjoy the light, maybe shop for a trifle or two; a public space, a special place.
Except here. What do you see on a typical American residential intersection? Houses, and more houses. Houses as far as the eye can see. When space does open up, it’s never space for people to meet, but space for cars to meet: commercial strips, highways, parking lots, minimalls. The crucial difference is that we didn’t design our neighborhoods; developers did, people who weren’t concerned with livability but with the bottom line. Public spaces use up valuable lots which could be sold as houses. Why bother? The reason we no longer know our neighbors is because we no longer have a place to meet them. The reason our communities are falling apart is because we’ve left them no place to be.
When Lakeman realized what he was trying to do, he drafted a manifesto and sent it out to his neighbors—Intersection Repair, he called it. He pointed out what he saw as missing, and what he hoped to do: repair the intersection, and transform it into what it should have been all along, the crossroads for their community. Already enchanted by the T-Hows, his neighbors responded enthusiastically; meetings were held, the manifesto hammered into shape, and a block party planned to celebrate. And on September 8, they all went out and marked their otherwise anonymous intersection, serving notice to the world at large that they were claiming it as public space.
They painted the street.
Giant concentric circles, which tied into the circles of sunflowers Lakeman had already planted. Lines radiating off these circles down each of the four streets: red, white, yellow, and black.
The Bureau of Transportation responded almost at once. You can’t paint the street, they said. It’s against the rules. It’s already done, said the neighbors. We all like it. Can’t you grant some sort of exemption?
Hell no, said the Bureau. Strip it up yourselves, or be prepared to pay a $1000 fine. And you’ll be liable for any accidents caused by your illegal markings.
The neighborhood prepared to do just that, while they worked every possible angle to keep their space. In November, just before the Bureau’s deadline, Lakeman made a presentation to a couple of aides from the offices of City Councilors Charlie Hales and Gretchen Kafoury. He told them about his experiences in the rain forest, and about what he’d learned; he showed them the T-Hows, and what it had done; he told them about piazzas, and how he hoped to grow one in Sellwood. He never finished his proposal. The aides began talking animatedly about the possibilities of this Intersection Repair project. The Bureau was told to grant an exception while the merits of this interesting proposal were studied.
Everybody’s happy, right?
“It looks,” said Janet Conklin, “like the slum areas outside of Bombay. It is garish, it is unsightly, it is an eyesore.”
The City Council held a hearing March 19 to determine the final outcome of the Intersection Repair project. Conklin was the lone voice of dissent; twelve people, from within the neighborhood and without, spoke in favor.
Conklin lives nearby, and owns a condominium at SE 9th and Weber; she has had to drive through the intersection several times a month. She wants the City Council to reject the permit. According to her testimony, Conklin isn’t against the community-building aspects of the project. The potlucks are fine, the block parties, the ubiquitous tea. But it’s a question of “fundamental æsthetics,” affecting a neighborhood “on the brink of renovation.” She suggests a community garden as an alternative to painting the street.
I haven’t personally seen a Bombay slum, so I can’t speak to that comparison, but I didn’t find the intersection to be unsightly, or an eyesore. But I’m not a property owner, with visions of renovation dancing in my head. I do note that there is no space anywhere available for a community garden.
The tea station, gazebo, benches, historical marker, all have a certain rough-hewn quality, but that’s of necessity. This is an “emergency piazza,” as the proposal puts it. The street is painted and these installations built out of found materials because there’s no other place to put it, no money set aside for it, no other way to do it—and yet this is something so vital, something so amazing to the neighborhood, that they went ahead and seized this intersection despite the rules and laws against it. Call it eminent domain by guerilla tactics.
Petitions were circulated in the immediate neighborhood, garnering 88 signatures in favor. Surveys were taken: 87% thought the neighborhood was safer now; 87% thought that communication between neighbors had improved; 81% thought traffic was safer and 90% thought it had slowed—traffic calming without speed bumps; 81% thought the neighborhood had become more livable.
The City Council voted unanimously to allow the project.
Portlanders are constantly told how lucky we are, what forward-thinking urban planners we have, what a progressive City Council, what a livable city. Here at least is an example of that: some hooligans deface public property, the Bureau of Transportation objects, a property owner frets about property values, the City Council grants the hooligans a permit.
But it’s easy to lose sight of our good fortune. Look at the damned US Bancorp Tower, or the sprawl along 82nd, or Burnside, or Sandy, or the horror stories about the Portland Building, or those horrible condominiums that just went up by the Lloyd Center, or the Lloyd Center itself. We just opened up the Urban Growth Boundary to more development of the soulless big box mini-mall suburban hell variety—and every month sees a new parking garage. It’s discouraging to realize that Portland is considered so livable merely because everywhere else is worse; it’s hard to know what to do when all the relevant decisions are made by groups so distant from our everyday lives.
Which brings us back to where we started, with the T-Horse.
When the Moonday T-Hows was dismantled, its ten rooms where dispersed throughout the city, to start ten new T-Howses. The Kitchen ended up in the back of a well-used blue Toyota pickup truck.
The T-Horse made its first appearance, sans wings, on Friday, December 13, 1996, in Pioneer Square, dispensing as always free tea and desserts to whomever stopped by. Ever since January 6 it has been working its way widdershins about the city, traveling from park to park, a new one every Monday night. It had grown wings, a heart-shaped canopy, and rugs and pillows and candles, and crowds—as many as a hundred a night as it neared the top of its Northeast arc. This is in the rain and chill of January, February, and March; imagine what it will look like in April, May, June.
The idea is to make at least two circles of the city, the second a little wider and more dispersed than the first, between January 6 and June 21, the summer solstice—and with the solstice comes City Repair.
City Repair is going to be a giant human circle which will link hands at high noon on June 21, along the route the T-Horse followed through the city. It’s also going to be a massive tea party and potluck to be held that evening, when the circle collapses and converges on Pioneer Square.
This is your chance to participate. The T-Horse is drawing people in, spreading the word, letting us all know something is happening. Like the initial outlaw street painting at 9th and Sherrett, City Repair will serve notice: we are seizing this space as ours. What happens next is up to us.
“Some bureaucrats are nervous,” says Lakeman, “concerned about the precedent being set.” No wonder. Lakeman would like to see no less than a city full of repaired intersections, residential neighborhoods clustered about their emergency piazzas, herds of T-Horses roaming the city—public spaces created by any means necessary. He’s seen how simple it is to start community, where before there was none: all it needs is a little food, some drink, a space, and the people will come. He’s seen the profound effect it’s had on his neighborhood. He wants the whole city to feel it.
“It’s funny,” he says. “People talk all the time about saving the rainforest, but this—this is coming out of the rainforest, to save us.”
