spleen

personal drek

I listened to the Indigo Girls for three straight months, mostly because it was the only tape I had that didn't break. I was on buses, countless buses going to Steele, North Dakota, Missoula, Coeur d'Alene, Eugene, Portland, San Francisco, anywhere west. I listened to white noise on a walkman in order to drown out the noise and press of other travelers. This was how I slept, swept up in static, my memory full of songs about travel and longing. I saw the basalt columns of the Columbia River gorge with that music in my head, and the Pacific Ocean, and the San Joaquin Valley, and the lonely hills of Utah, and on and on.

This is far ahead of the story I want to tell you. A year before that trip, I lived in New Mexico for a couple of months. I spent most of my time in Ranchos de Taos, a poor shepherding town just south of the wealthy tourist trap of Taos. I was there to help a friend build an adobe house, and together we lived in the high desert and erected walls and laid a floor made of river stone. The area was so poor that there was very little proper plumbing; instead water and waste and everything else was handled by an elaborate system of garden hoses that dumped the whole mess into a nearby arroyo. What a strange time. I walked deep and narrow arroyos, following trails of footprints and horse dung. I walked a portion of the old Santa Fe trail, and went into the mountains to gather stone for our floor.

It was the mountains that changed me. You walk fifty yards from the trail, and you find yourself in mountains where no human has left a trace, and where the only sound is the strange ticking of insects in the trees. It's dry and clear, and you can think. There was a short time where I seriously considered surrendering books and computers and everything else for a life of mountains and sheep. How strange that would have been. But I thought of the Red-Crosse Knight and his Hierusalem, and I felt called to the world. The place of the poet is here in the world, sick with the world, constantly teaching. That was when I knew I was done with Romanticism.

Once, I was stuck in Vegas for five hours. There was a very drunk young Blackfoot Indian there who was furious at being robbed. He had no money, and someone had stolen his bus ticket. For some reason he wanted to be my friend, though I am generally the last person people want to be friends with. He wanted to tell me everything. "You're a writer," he said, and then he told me stories and finished them with, "Put that in your book." This man was the size of a small mountain. I could tell he had been crying. "All I wanted was to get home," he said, "and maybe some music for the journey." And then he told me a story, a great story, and he said, "Put that in your book." I will tell you that story someday, and I will tell you about my time wandering west, and what I saw, and how beautiful and ruined the world is. But not today.

Posted in personal, prayer | No Comments »

notes on a rainy day

It's interesting to me how little of the current hypertext/new media theory comes from people of my generation. Look at websites containing essays on cyberculture, and you'll find the majority of them have that "circa 1994″ look of simplified layout and clunky graphics, and are maintained by people our parents' age (e.g., Sherry Turkle, Theodore Roszak, etc). People my age grew up right on the cusp of modern computing — we had the Apple IIse, the Commodore Vic 20, and similar pre-floppy disk, pre-hard drive machines. The internet was a sci-fi concept that came to us most prominently through War Games. Still, we grew up with the technology; we came of age right when the World Wide Web first became big, and many of us (myself included) came of age as artists specifically because our contact with other artists through the global network.

So here's the question: we're all using the network. Why aren't we writing about it?

Posted in computery stuff, media / news | No Comments »

notes on the computer as text

The digital age offers us written texts in essentially two formats: luminous (or digital) and non-luminous (or traditional). Traditional written texts rely on the reflection of light from the writing surface; light strikes the page, and the areas of high and low spectral absorption are interpreted by our eyes and brains as characters, words, paragraphs. Digital written texts rely on the luminosity of the screen; light travels from the screen towards our eyes, and those areas in which the light was modified or absent allows us to perceive characters and colors. This is why many people have difficulty reading long texts on a computer screen — it simply isn't the same material process as traditional reading.

One way to think of the computer is as a cluster of interactive, dynamic texts. The most dynamic is the screen itself; this is the text of human-to-human or human-to-machine interaction. Your screen contains the entire virtual world. Next is random access memory, or RAM, to which data is written and recalled as needed. RAM is a kind of text, and a particularly fascinating one, because its contents are temporary by design.

Next, the hard drive. We move further from the human component in computing, as well as further from dynamism. Data is electromagnetically written to sectors on the surface of the disk; some of this data is protected, unchangeable, available in read-only form. It is a luminous kind of text in that its contents are still partially dynamic and reliant upon digital and electrical components; much like a blackboard, it is possible to wipe the hard drive clean.

Then the processor. This is traditional writing, non-luminous. The processor consists of a silicon surface upon which pathways have been etched — written — in order to perform floating-point operations. This is the binary machine-to-machine language, as static (or dynamic) as a book or a newspaper. It is the core of the machine, upon which all of the functions of hard drive, RAM, screen and the like are built.

The core of what we do here, therefore, is textual.

Posted in computery stuff, theory | No Comments »

<burp>

Whenever spring sets in and the weather begins to improve, I invariably crave either Thai food or Vietnamese food. When it's high summer, I always crave Mexican food. Unfortunately, the Mexican food in Fargo is largely quite bad; the one Vietnamese restaurant here has lost its edge and now serves watered-down dishes, and there are no Thai restaurants at all.

Currently I'm making a lot of Thai. I can make three main kinds of peanut sauce, two types of red curry, several kinds of relish, a number of salads (the mango and papaya salads are the best, I think), a few kinds of soup, and of course, rice. I make rice in the Japanese fashion, though I don't wash it first (we lean college kids need all the nutrients we can get). I want to learn to make a good green curry, but it's hard to get good fresh lemongrass here (and a lot of the recipes call for kaffir lime leaves, which are all but impossible to get).

I have a pile of Mexican recipes. I spent a lot of time in California nagging people from restaurants, and when I used to work for the county, some of my clients would bring me food to thank me for preparing their resumes and I would ask them for the recipe. The one thing I never mastered, though, were the amazing tamales. There are women in southern California who spend all night making tamales (it's a several-hour affair) and all day walking around and selling them for a dollar each. I used to have them for lunch all the time when I worked at this junk store in a bad part of town. You buy a couple of these things, open up the foil, and see a corn husk wrapped around a blend of meat, masa and spices. It smells exactly like childhood.

The tamales in New Mexico were amazing, too, but quite different. They were made with chicken, corn, olives, raisins, peppers and spices, and were so exotic that I believed, at least for one meal, that I was in another country.

I make very good chili verde. I also make fine tacos (real tacos, mind you), carnitas, huevos rancheros (of course), homemade chorizo (without casing), and passable al pastor. My favorite thing, though, is Cuban quesadillas. These are nothing like the Americanized quesadillas we've all had. They're made with mashed potatoes wrapped in a ball around a mix of refried black beans (or meat) and cheese, then battered and fried. I learned to make them from a Cuban family in Fargo years ago. They're amazingly good.

I would love to learn to make paella, but I can never afford it — all that shellfish costs too much out here in the hinterland. I've never even had paella, as I've always been too poor to order it; I've seen it and smelled it in passing, though, and it looks quite good.

I've never made Vietnamese food. Maybe I'll learn a bit of that over the summer.

In the autumn, I make a lot of soul food. I grew up on soul food and other Southern cuisine so it's a nice hearkening back to childhood. I have yet to encounter another soul here who can make good collard greens, by the way. Winter is mostly Italian and French cuisine, probably because I crave all that fatty stuff when it's cold (I crave wine, too, and Italian and French food demand wine). I also love to make bread and killer desserts — cheesecake, tiramisu, pastries, truffles from scratch. I actually don't have much of a sweet tooth anymore, and tend to prefer the subtler Southern treats, like hot milk cake.

Anyway, the point is that I love to cook. Strangely, I think I love making food even more than I love eating it (and I really love to eat).

Eventually, I'll be off to watch movies. Meanwhile, you get to hear all my trivial cooking nonsense. Feel lucky I didn't go on about the history of the peanut, with which I can fill several pages.

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a hit, a palpable hit

Interesting unexplained recent/regular visits to this journal:

- Someone from China with an outdated browser (I suspect this is a bot or a web crawler, and if it is, it should die — it's ignoring robots.txt);

- Someone from New England (Mass., somewhere near Martha's Vineyard);

- Someone from Montana (Circle, MT?), by way of everypoet.com;

- someone from France (but I think I know who that is).

This only makes me curious because there's no real content at this site, and no one really knows who I am. How in the world do people find me, and quite frankly, why do they care? I'm as boring as they come.

I lifted the ban on various IP addresses some time ago — this journal is now viewable from anywhere, as far as I know. The journal will be subscription-oriented in a couple of weeks anyway, so what does it matter.

Posted in computery stuff | No Comments »