information infiltration; or to wiki or not to wiki...

“Google” something you want an answer to and what you’ll find at the top is either paid for or the person who wrote the website embedded language within the title and somewhere else in the coding that mirrored your search phrase. It means nothing...money, skills or luck, gets information its location. We are literally swimming in information—we are information—Planet Money said in a podcast recently that the world has turned into data and data-miners. People are writing code now to find out the best place to buy a slice of pizza. This kind of saturation makes it easy to find evidence that will support even the most outlandish claims…we live in a world where everyone is right…at least we can find credible sources that say so.

Let’s start small. Let’s say you want to know how many spaces should follow a period. Well some teachers will tell you two, others one. Go to any MLA website and they will say one or the other, sometimes both. Thanks to Slate Magazine via a shared posting on fb, I can proffer one possible solution to the quagmire. In the early 20th century typographers in Europe established the one space rule and it wasn’t until typewriters came along that the two space rule was devised because typewriting machines work on what’s called “monospaced type.” This was a new development. Typesetting was an artform and relied on “proportional type,” when the typewriter came, it was mass-produced and easier and more cost-efficient to create all the little letters the same size, thus allowing for easy repair and or production. According to Slate magazine who cites James Felici, author of The Complete Manual of Typography, “Monospaced type gives you text that looks "loose" and uneven; there's a lot of white space between characters and words, so it's more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read” (Slate). An interesting note about the two space rule, once word processing programs entered the equation, “monospaced type,” disappeared, but because a generation of typists learned on manual typers, the two space rule remained.

The point is, information suitable to your needs, can be found anywhere—if you’re patient and read through it—carefully. When I do my own research here in Germany, I start with our library’s databases…Gale and Ebscohost. These are excellent starting points. If you are in 10th  thru 12th grade, consider the John F. Kennedy Institute’s library. With your parents’ permission you can get a library card there and are granted access to the known literary and historical world. JSTOR, Eric, US Library of Congress, Galileo, not to mention they have a massive collection of periodicals. For those of you who don’t know what periodicals are…they’re essays…millions of essays, and what any teacher over the age of 30 had to swim through in order to write a literary critique in high school and college.

If you’re a youngster, Gale from the library is perfect. Do your wiki and your google scholar searches to get to know your topic and then dive into the database offered right here. A little-known tip—and this is a keeper—often times when searching a database, it only provides an abstract (a brief synopsis) of the article. Cut-n-paste the title into your favorite search engine followed by dot pdf (.pdf) and 9 out of 10 times the article will pop up. Sometimes it’s only an image, but a usable source nonetheless.

Everyone can start using “educational search engines.” Refseek (my favorite) and google scholar, these will get you access to the abstracts and then you can—dot pdf—your way to a bevy of legitimate essays, journals and articles.

The older students should find Owl.english.purdue an invaluable resource. Anything you want, and free. I have found some rules to be outdated, but in those cases…don’t worry, your teacher is probably still doing it that way too.

The younger kids…partner-tongue especially…check out chompchomp.com for all your grammar questions. This place gives you easy to follow rules and practice exercises…I use this site in my own classes.

Frontline, Nova, PBS—these places give you legitimate and topical information in easy to digest formats, i.e., videos. Get a podcast downloader and listen to Fresh Air, Science Friday, Planet Money and This American Life…Prairie Home companion you should add just because it’s fun. These are all English options…but any public library will surprise you with its wealth. In the states, I went to libraries instead of going out. Nothing better than a late-night alone in a quiet library reading. I wish the JFK Institute was open on weekends. The world is become information kids—the number one tool you’ll need in deciphering it—reading. Read—read—read…that’s free of charge, and not available on wiki.

What's really going on; dgc...lmnop!

I’m getting paranoid. The other day I heard Sophocles echoing down the hall…he was accusing Coleridge of contributing to the exodus of faith. The Mariner’s not to blame, he’s only a sailor—reliant on wind. Not unlike Traveling through the dark, these mythic giants don’t waste time wondering what the other path would have resulted in, they contribute to the value of shadows and shades, and their only evidence exists is faint shadows. More like ashes, like what Pompeii left behind. I can’t differentiate between my life and fiction. I can’t figure out how to sculpt my own theories yet…not without support…but I’m fine with this.

I’m Big Chief, sweeping my broom around the ward. My family would go to these meetings with our pastor. Tuesday nights in the same hall where the Friday night fish-fry took place. Remember those old church halls in the part of the church that seemed invisible from the outside as you passed by on the street. The felt-covered accordion-style room dividers on tracks that crossed the great hall three or four times creating smaller rooms for classes. It was at one of these meetings my mom read a poem she’d written about masks. I couldn’t understand her obsession with pointing out the obvious. Of course people put on masks…I knew this innately as a 10 year old kid. It was her making such a row out of the notion that threw me off. This seemed the way everything operated.

I wasn’t aware of the consequences, nor was I really aware of the context wherein masks appear and disappear…I only knew to change my presentation under different particular situations. I wasn’t aware on a conscious level that people could be manipulated under these conditions…I simply believed that people behaved differently to suit a given context and the best I could hope for was friendly discourse. Of course discourse for a 10 year old boy, is playing a made up game, playing wiffle ball, or D and D. None the less, if I could behave in such a way that gave me an opportunity to win I did that, assuming everyone else was behaving likewise. My mom’s insistence that this behavior should be stopped was one that I adhered to for a long time. I realize now, my mom was in her early thirties, and she thought her experience was unique and because no one seemed as perturbed by the hypocrisy of such behavior she felt the need to “represent” so-to-speak and she rebelled. By thirty I knew this kind internalized rejection of what happens in socialized settings was how people interacted. People wear masks…it’s necessary. Occasionally people unveil what they think is a mask and this continues in a back and forth, ebb and flow that adds to the beauty of us. We are wonderfully imaginative.

Anyway, she read the poem and we all sat there silently. I liked it. Thought it was honest but it was my reaction to the pastor’s solemn and somber reaction that planted the seed…this is a tragic p.o.v. His entire body language emblazoned on my psyche—this is not the way to view human interactions. Like everyone has an ulterior motive is such a skewed perspective from reality that it’s shameful. Someone could have just asked one simple question…So?

…And your issue with this?

…Yes, this is how we know when it’s safe to take off the masks.

…or to put one back on.

I feel like Big Chief. The ward. If I am Big Chief, I’m liking my chances. Not so much for McMurphy, he’s doomed…he bit off mor’n he c’n chew with Big Nurse. Tom Wait’s says, “don’t believe a lawyer when he swears.” Shakespearian. These are the ashen figures I speak about. Big Chief is a dark shadow in the mind as you read and later think about in your daily life and the shadow darkens and stands like a Neanderthal silhouette hunching behind your peripheral spectrum. This mythic figure following you around…sweeping his broom. Ahh! It’s inescapable! This is nothing but beauty—confusion.

The kids are like a new earth—an earth in its infancy—being pummeled by information and experiences. Every new experience—and they are prolific in production—is a violent explosion of meteoric proportions. A weathering that can only take place in the violence of birth. The earth was violent in the shaping of it, and yet it’s beautifully round. A more apt metaphor cannot exist in terms of literature. The roundness of earth’s character suggests complexity and beauty as all round characters in literature seem to exhibit. This is the same for these kids…time for retrospect comes in brief flashes…clues and cues…too much is happening to stop and assess.

I couldn’t take the train to prague this weekend. The train workers are on strike. They had a successful strike I guess…’cept the way I see it, I don’t get to see my kid till tomorrow. I’m quite certain no…kein gmbh suffered under the weight of this strike as much as me. You see, I’m still somewhat ego centric. The difference is that now I know it’s not intentional. It’s not something happening wherein I am the central character. When you’re in seventh grade….absolutely everything is a reflection in which you are the center. You get to be in eleventh grade and kids have weathered some…not so easily amused. A bank has already started developing. This sort of fellow…we’ve seen this before…but still, nothing in comparison to 45 years. But the beauty is that new experiences are still as prevalent.

The earth is the earth. Beauty has an open-door policy. You can’t see beauty until you’ve weathered. Rather, versions of beauty change, and the most remarkable thing about life is that currently…always right now…is the most opportune time to witness the pinnacle of beauty. After it’s past it only becomes something you can try to explain…if it hasn’t happened yet it only becomes idealized versions of reality…the now…is only available when it’s happening.

When the earth was new it took a beating. The guys on the Ward, they're formed old earth but Big Nurse and the Combine doesn't like the shape of their landscape and like a meteor shower they work and weather 'em. "Work 'em woe," old Mariner said. The students in my classes are perfectly formed planets of their own...yea! but we weather 'em and work 'em, rain down a thousand years of storms and like a storm front works the fields so do we work their lives until one snaps, dries up, got no more to give. 

after i told her about it, she asked why i would do that

if it's happened to me,
   and to you
   it's not that significant

being able to recognize
     a good place to take a seat

forcing yourself
further;
even when you're screaming
at yourself to stop...
this is good

she told me
i stress when the plan
breaks down;
it was hard
to look at her in the face,
sex would have
been easier

outside my window
         the rain is coming down
in straight lines

they're cooking frogs in america

get outside of berlin if you want to practice your deutsch

"Deine deutsch ist schleckt," an old man said to me when i tried to explain to him where i was going

goddamn i got a good laugh on that one...the old man looked at me, certain i was crazy.

i stopped to get an ice cream at a little cafe just off the Elbe bike trail, and to fill my water bottle up. it was early in the day but i'd already gotten in 70 klicks or so, and the old woman who owned the place with her husband asked me what i was doing in this part of germany. i told her i wanted to live in germany, that i loved it here. she was struck dumb, especially when she'd learned the different places i'd lived in america. "Wie so?" why germany? america is so beautiful. i asked her if she knew the story of the frog in the warm bath. she'd never heard of it, but that quite possibly was because meine deutsch ist sehr shleckt. "well," i said. "this frog was taking a warm bath. but what the frog didn't know was that the bath was actually a large pot of warm water placed on a stove at low heat. the frog never noticed that the heat was slowly being turned up and the frog eventually ended up cooked and used as a soup. well, that's what they're doing in america, cooking frogs."

we both laughed heartily at that one. i believe she understood me.

the campingplatzen in deutschland are spectacular. one day, after 80 klicks into a pretty good headwind, i pulled into one with an olympic sized pool, waterslides, a live band and bratwurst stands and beer and schnapps vendors. i set up camp, took a dip in the pool, grabbed a beer and a kirschwasser and listened to a trio performing Nirvana and Pearl Jam covers.

tractors used to scare me when i was a kid riding my bike on the rural roads of Valley City. they were big and you could hear them coming up behind you on your bike. i would get nervous as i heard them approach. i learned that it was best not to look behind you. on occasion i'd turn at the last minute as a big old tractor pulling a trailer piled high with straw and nearly topple my bike as it'd speed by me. well, the tractors in sweden and denmark are 5 times as big and look like transformers and fast. i felt that adrenaline.

when in sweden and denmark, with the sun setting on the golden fields, i was transported to the Valley City of my youth.

dusk calms the winds and cools the road, brings relief from headwinds and sunburn, the kind of relief only the shade of a maple tree can bring.

gliding into a town after humping uphill for 20 klicks.

port towns. Rostock, Germany; Trelleborg, Sweden; Hellsingborg, Sweden; Hellingsorg, Denmark; Lubeck, Germany.

when boarding a ferry on a bike, pay attention to the guys directing traffic and alles gut.

i have a kinship with truck drivers.

the northeastern coast of denmark looks a lot like new england.

the interior of southern sweden looks like ohio.

copenhagen is full of itself...you're not that cool copenhagen. and for that matter neither are you berlin. get a grip and recognize how lucky you are instead of trying to be hip.

berlin starts to reveal itself about 100 klicks before you actually get to the city limits.

Sweden ain't not place for a dying king

I want to take bike trips like this as a family. 

I'm getting familiar and comfortable with the bike trip. So far so good...fits.  

Good to carry yer Waits with you. 

 If its happened to me, and to you, it should be recognized.  

I wonder what nomenclature my son will decide upon for me. Should I be influential in directing him...is it possible to provide an environment sterile of influence... 

What does Marcela want to be called by Oliver... 

I'm going to call him son... 

The rain is steady, but it's nothing compared to my first summer trip along Germany's north coast. That was miserable. I may be adjusting. I can't believe Swedes can't purchase beer over 3.5 unless arranged special. 

Looks like the sun might burn off some rain clouds...get a round or two before the sunsets. It sets much later here in Eslöv than I'm accustomed to. 

Arabs and Mexicans suffer the free world's venom. I wonder who the Chinese hate. 

As you can see, they are not from here...subtle and yet, blatant and obvious.  

Where's the speakeasy? Du weiss Wo ist die speakeasy? 

You wanna be a drunkard here, you gotta do a little planning. 

Met a Netherlander couple yesterday in Helsingborg. They were remarkable in their cohesion over their insistence to travel without GPS. It was maps or not at all. I don't know if they had a compass. I was embarrassed to admit how devoted I was to the GPS and realize it's as if I'm an avatar and the real me is busy making his way through space via the device.  

I came across this little beauty and thought I would have to be a royal idiot to not have a seat. 

Vigilance...resilience...v applies to ordenung. Keep a mental image of where everything is. R applies to mental awareness of breath and muscle activity. Careful of my behavior for the first time in terms of my age and physical condition. Like, no shit...you could die doing that...huh, glad I took 44 years to start worrying about all that shite. 

Copenhagen is big. 

Nørreport 

Herfølge 

I went for a walk in the woods near my campsite. I took my bike for the basket, I was taking along a couple beers and a camp chair. I found a quiet place to sit. I returned to camp and ate dinner and went for a walk, this time without my bike. Upon realizing I'd stumbled on the same location I'd been previously I decided to head back the way I'd gone earlier. I happened to look down and sitting there on the path was my wallet. 

They put an ICE train on the ferry. 

Two cows are sitting facing one another in a replicated scene from the matrix. The Neo cow is imagining he's a quick-mart clerk in worst part of Detroit. Guns are being fired in the distance and he's selling malt liquor and lucky strikes to a 15 year old kid. 

The Morpheus cow is holding the classic blue and red pills in his hooves and he sees the reality of rows and rows of his brethren being sodomized by machines. 

Obama at a party shortly after getting caught with the NSA/Snowden affair. He's reaching into a cookie jar in which all the cookies are labeled, "we're all doing it," and "you disgust us," written in icing.  

Hilary, Bush two, Merkel, and Putin are all laughing and pointing at the obvious metaphor and Merkel is saying, "what a duschbag," and Putin's like, "C'mon you big gay retard, let's get you a shot."

The Question of Coincidence

sometimes, when I read aloud to students I carry this southern dialect. I imagine I'm Bob Dylan, or Woodie Guthrie...maybe Charles Bukowski...I draw out my S's and L's and like William Burroughs I swagger down the sidewalk slinging axioms. I imagine old folk singers--and the whistle of an old train sings in the back-drop like a painting.

A long time ago, I found this old copy of Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell. I think of this book on occasion...much like Cold Dog Soup, and this other book that I can't recall the title of. The Orwell book is about a guy who makes his living in hotels and restaurants as a waiter. It's written a year before Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and if you like that book, you should definitely check out Down and Out. 

I read it and I was a waiter at the time. I knew this attorney from Texas when I was living in Portland. He was a smart guy and he lived in one of those tenement housing places where the hallway light is busted out and you can hear the cries of babies and domestic violence as you pass by doorways on your way to whichever dingy room you're going to. He didn't need to be there...I think he was doing it on purpose. He always seemed to me like a character in a Vonnegut book. Filled with irony and slapstick. I've been in many places like this. They are always depressing and you sit on milk crates and cast glances around at the cracked paint and it must be raining outside because the grey of the place permeates the senses. His room was partly underground so he only had half light from those cellar windows. But, it was comfy and clean...he had like 5 locks and a steel bracer on his door. It always reminded me of Down and Out. 

I lived in a trailer outside of Hartington, Nebraska in the early '90's. It wasn't a trailer park, but a field of wild grass with a scattering of similar trailers as if someone tossed them out there like dice. No roadways or paths, just a grass field you drove up to and parked next to. I had this old blue stationwagon that when parked next to the old trailer must have looked like a redneck version of an Ed Hopper painting. The trailer had brown shag carpet and a kitchen that rivaled any meth lab. At night, under the dim lamplight and glow of the TV, it seemed almost cozy, but under the harsh light of day it was depressingly grey. 

On Saturday mornings when me, Chad and Brad would clean the place from top to bottom we'd open both doors and all the windows and it was like that old skeleton ship the Mariner sails up from the South Pole on. We'd play something like Chili Peppers or Ministry and clean as the fresh air filtered the dinge from the place and we'd put out the lawn chairs and crack a beer and it seemed like life wasn't going to get better. This was surely the end, and we would talk and laugh. We all knew this couldn't be all there was. There had to be more and we racked our brains trying to figure a way off this forsaken desert.  

In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the mariner stops a wedding guest, a close relative of the groom, and tells him the story of how he shot an albatross. I read this poem in high school, again years later as a graduate student and I've tried to teach it a few times. The first time was in Florida. I tried to have the kids draw pictures of certain particularly vivid images that fill the poem. Picture this....

'The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,

Merrily did we drop

Below the kirk, below the hill,

Below the lighthouse top.'

Now this one from Farewell to Manzanar. 

'...and they were easing away from the wharf, joining the line of boats heading out past the lighthouse, into the harbor [...] from the wharf we waved goodbye [...] we watched until the boats became a row of tiny white gulls on the horizon. Our vigil would end when they slipped over the edge and disappeared.' 

Is this coincidence?

I once came to a conclusion, regarding something metaphysical...or maybe it was existential...whatever the case, I'm still thinking about this thing...this conclusive understanding I came to. I was probably in my mid-to late thirties the first time the notion occurred to me. The idea that there are no accidents. That everything is cause and effect. Like Bob Dylan telling us the whole wide universe is watching the chimes of freedom flashing, we are all of us connected--a grand cascading of dominoes. But does this point of view include the idea that like no accidents, there are no coincidences? 

Co-incident. At least two incidents simultaneously. Nothing within the semantic syntax implies that coincidence should be a surprise. Once when I was in high school I threw this party. We were sitting around the kitchen table playing drinking games with cards. It was early yet, and it was just good friends--still our group of pranksters. I was getting up to get a beer from the fridge and on a whim I peeled the top card from the deck sitting in the middle of the table and licked the back of it and simultaneously the number 10 flashed in my mind, and I slapped the card on my forehead and said, "10."

Everybody's jaws dropped and hooting and howling of the most appealing nature that I didn't even need to look at it and I took and slapped it back into place on top of the deck in the middle of the table, threw my hands up and walked out of the room. The place erupted. It was one of my finest moments...and I don't consider that flippantly. I'd consider it a coincidence tho. Not an accident. There seems to be no reason to believe my randomly saying the same number that I draw, is a result of a direct "cause and effect," relationship. And this is the test I apply to whether or not it's an accident or not. 

My thesis is only based on personal experience, but when I examine what seems to be an accident, I can trace it back to it's source. Thus the difference between accident and coincident lies in whether or not you can trace the thing to its source. I say source because it's a better term than "the beginning cause of the thing," because it's not a beginning. It's only the source of the most recent cause and effect thing that made that happen. I never go that far back...it gets wacky and I have other things I'd like to accomplish in life. I'm not some ga'dam Raskolnikov. Man talk about a head trip. I read Crime and Punishment over a summer. I drank the words. I became Raskolnikov. 

So when I tried to get the kids to draw pictures of it was a disservice to the kids. I didn't know the poem well enough to be confident. I can pull this off now and the kids are with me.   So anyway, I was talking about living in that old trailer, well my friend J.J. came out to see me and the first thing he says to me is, "Well man, here's to living like the Romans." 

I had no idea what that meant. Never even heard the phrase and to me I imagined having marble baths, steam and a lot of grapes and palm fronds. Anyway, I know I've told this story on more than a few occasions. Most of the time, J.J.'s in the same room, but I've told people this story who have no idea who J.J. is--so, suffer me one more time, for the blog. 

We decided to take the old station wagon to Lincoln. The ol' girl was a dirty mess of a heap. The attachment of the female gender to a car is not intended provocation, it's just what I did because I'd heard the same thing from other people around me. We never made it. We got stuck in the mud on a dirt road. Unbeknownst to me, dirt roads turn to mud in rain. I've driven dirt roads my entire life and never imagined it could turn to absolute slop. Like concrete when it's got just a bit too much water. That kind of muck in like 10 minutes it took from the time it started raining to the time we couldn't move. Luckily a farmer came by in the morning and pulled us out. 

It's night time and we were drinking beers on the side of some dirt road listening to Art Bell on the radio. J.J. gets out to take a leak and I start the car.

"What're you doin' esterle?"

"Nothin' man, I don't want the battery to go dead."

He finishes and goes to get in the car and I toss his smokes out the door and he's gotta go get them and as soon as he turned his back I put he car in gear and started rolling forward.

"What the fuck esterle!" 

"Don't worry man, I think that's a cop pulling up behind us." And he lunges to grab his smokes and reaches for the door and I tapped the gas and he had to walk alongside but he had a hold of the door. I sped up again and he had to jog.

"F'n' stop esterle you f'n asshole!" And I'm laughing like a crazy hyena and I slow down and he's running really fast so I slow gradually and he eventually is walking alongside the car cursing a bluestreak across my family's ancestry. But when he finally got in the car, I looked down and he wasn't wearing any shoes or socks. That blew my mind. 

But that's not really a coincidence, or an accident...intent or intention should rule out any possible coincidence or accident. Coincidences exist. When they are good, dann alles klar! 

Traveling thru the darkness...www.dig

Go into the dark and natural world willingly
quiet and still, and welcome the voices and faces
waiting for you.

Go there and greet your loneliness and fear,
sit with them and talk, drink a cup of coffee
and break bread with them.

Smoke a pipe and listen
while they teach you. Do like those prophets
who've recorded and transcribed.

Then like an oppressed slave
devour their art and wisdom and memorize
everything and make them sing your songs.

When you return and walk thru ruined architecture;
roll up your jeans; pay no mind to the wandering eye.