digital digs

on invention: two suns on the horizon

Last night I did a reading with my colleagues David Franke and Vicki Boynton at the Homer Center for the Arts. It's been a while since we read together. Here's what I read, a little piece on the task of invention.

Two Suns on the Horizon

Saturday April 1st  1994 was one of two days that year that Trinity Site was open to the public. It's not an easy place to find. As you might imagine, the site for the first atomic bomb test is a fairly remote location. We were headed to Trinity Site for inspiration, to bear witness to the atomic age that had shaped our childhood. Lying awake in bed in third grade, it struck me as some inevitable logic that a button, once built, must eventually be pushed. In 1994 though, Trinity more represented a past era, the techno-optimism of syndicated afternoon sitcoms that charmed us with their naïve murderous glee. 

Four of us headed out from Las Cruces that morning.  Rhonda, my girlfriend of about two weeks and I were in the backseat. Daniel and Eduardo sat up front.  A year later, Ed would be in jail for raping and attempting to murder one of his students in the midst of a bipolar schizophrenic episode. To this day he remains in prison, now with a pacemaker, on drugs that keep him purportedly sane at the cost of slowly killing him and causing his hands to shake so badly he can't manage to write: the one thing he truly loved to do. Earlier that morning, he'd been holding Rhonda's thin wrists, remarking on her veins, and discussing their appeal to vampires like himself. You would have thought we might have recognized a warning sign like that.

But sometimes creativity is like that. It drives you a little mad. It asks you to take on an identity that is not quite human, that is not part of the ready-made culture of consumable personae. It leaves you with two minds about your work, scratching at your chin, pawing through your hair, mumbling to yourself.

A poetic of invention

As we do each semester, this weekend my colleagues and I went to the college's Adirondack camp at Raquette Lake. The culminating event of the weekend is an evening performance in which everyone participates. So here I am reading the little piece I wrote on Saturday.

What Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Rene Descartes, Socrates, Mary-Kate and Ashely Olsen, and I all have in common

Yes, apparently we are all "engineer" personality types. Finally I had a semi-legitimate reason to put the Olsen twins on my blog. Now I'll really see some web traffic! BTW, it seems that fictional characters can also be personality types and that I am joined by an android (Data from Star Trek) and a cyborg (Seven of Nine, from Star Trek: Voyager). [side note: Brent Spiner, the actor who played data, is also an engineer. Talk about typecasting, huh?]

And about that introverted thing (said the blogger): it's not that I'm shy. It's just that I can't think of a good reason to talk to you ;)

the godless recall 9/11

Last weekend professional writing had it's fall trip to Raquette Lake. We had a great time, as usual. We also had our regular Saturday night reading. This time, however, I recorded the reading. Here's my performance, and I hope more will follow (assuming others will give me the OK).

The Godless Recall 9/11

Cortland's Literary magazines

The students of the Cortland Writers Association will be releasing copies of our two literary magazines, Transition and She Said, She Said. It's always a fair amount of work to get done, and I'm always wondering if it will get done on time, but somehow it always works out. This year, like last year, the students asked some of the faculty to include some work. So there's a brief piece of mine in there.

We'll be having a reading on April 21st to celebrate the release of the magazine. Until then, here's a reading of my piece, titled "Three Roadside Cutshots," a kind of half prose poem/half flash fiction piece.

Download roadside.mp3

affect and childhood games

If you have young children like mine, you might be familiar with a game called Whoonu. It's a simple game about your favorite things. There's a big stack of cards, and each card lists some thing or activity. In the game, you take six cards and then pick a couple that you think would be the favorites of a designated player called the "whoosit." Each round a new player becomes the whoosit. The whoosit's job is to take the cards selected by the other players and place them in order from most to least favorite. You get more points for picking a card the whoosit likes more. After everyone has a turn as whoosit, the player with the most points wins.

Got it?

Ok, so here's the interesting thing. I'm sure you could list your favorite fruits or bands or restaurants, but can you order the following things, for example, in the same way:

• concerts
• snowball fights
• daydreaming
• remote control
• the high dive
• taking naps

What is the basis for comparing apples to oranges or apples to eBay for that matter? Well, it's not that hard. I mean, a five-year old can do it, right? But how do you do it? You have to test your feelings for "snowball fights" versus your feelings for "daydreams" or "naps." Not to over-analyze a childhood game (fort/da anyone?) but I would suggest that we are looking at "pure" affectivity here.

Now, obviously these are culturally value-laden objects and practices, but we have no clear cultural mechanism for organizing and ordering all of these items (and this would be a typical list). Thus while our reactions stem from memory, culture and other subjective-ideological responses, in comparing those reactions we must rely upon a measurement of affective instensity.

I'm thinking it's an interesting, creative exercise to develop this type of general affective sensitivity.

no time like the present

Wired has a interesting article on physics outsider Peter Lynds, whose work extends on Einstein's in contending that time does not exist as such. As the articles suggests, in this theory, "a fundamental indeterminacy connects the blurry probabilities of the quantum universe with the seemingly stable macroverse where you and I live." Of course, for physics that's not really quite enough and one of the questions Lynds and others raise is "if time does not exist as such, why do we experience the universe as a series of succesive events?"

Since Newton's calculus, physics has imagined a universal clock that divides time and space into discreet units. Einstein brought that into question, and Lynds has built on Einstein's work. Looking at the issue from a Deleuzian perspective, say with his concept of time as Aeon, this seems to fit with a certain strand of philosophy. And it is from Deleuze that one might get a sense of how to answer the question about the shift from Aeon to Chronos, from a plane of consistency to a plane of reference. Lynds hypothesizes that "in respect to causality, it would be nonconscious cognition that is the result of neuronal processes in the brain that causes consciousness: consciousness would be an emergent property of neuronal activity. Furthermore, as all cognition would  originate from nonconscious nueronal processes, consciousness would have no causal relationship to further conscious cognition." I would qualify this last claim by suggesting that consciousness does feedback into neuronal processes. However, I might agree that such a feedback wouldn't necessarily be causal, though one might think of the way one can use conscious, meditative techniques to calm anxiety as an example of this feedback.

Anyway, I think it is interesting to note the potential coming together here of physics and Deleuzian thought. And I see two fundamental ways in which this is relevant for new media rhetoric and composition.

1. Computers, with their clock speed, are clearly engineered to function as serial or parallel processors. We can see here that perhaps human cognition does not function this way, that time comes in almost at the end of the thought process. In attempting to understand the material processes of technology and thought, the rhetorical experience of new media, addressing models of cognition, such as this one, is imperative.
2. As much as we may like to focus on the social, discursive, ideological elements of rhetoric, any rhetorical theory, by necessity, has at least an implicit theory of cognition. If we can suggest that time does not exist as such, that it is, like consciousness, an emergent quality of cognitive processes that occur in the spacetime of Aeon, a plane of consistency, or whatever Lynds might want to call it, then by necessity we must understand both rhetoric and pedagogy in a fundamentally different way.
   

idyll winter engine: retreat to RL

Came back from our annual winter writers' retreat to Raquette Lake (RL). RL is in the Adirondack Park (upstate NY) between Old Forge and Blue Mountain, about three hours from SUNY Cortland and, as it happens, not far from my family's homestead in Speculator NY, where I spent many a summer as kid. My playful pun on RL (real life) remarks on the "nature" of the retreat and the RL site.

The Huntington Camp was one of the first great camps built in the Adirondacks a century or so ago. In fact, the camp was recently identified as a national historic site.  In many respects it is still a very naturalistic place. The camp is accessible only by boat (or ice bridge in the winter). There is snow shoeing and x-country skiing in the winter, kayaking and canoeing when its warmer.  It is comforable, but it is still a camp. It ain't a hotel, which is a good thing. However it has high speed wireless networking across the camp, video conferencing -- all the technologies that are now integral to education.

In short, it is a wonderful contemplative environment.  But it is hardly a space not interpenetrated by information technologies. One of the primary tasks of our retreat this weekend was to work on our undergraduate literary magazine. This meant we spent a good amount of time working on laptops. Students played mp3's and IM'd their friends back on campus--just like they would if we were in our computer classroom in Cortland.

So this is RL. Nature. Technology. Meditative contemplation in a snow bank. Networked composition in a modern log cabin-style classroom.

I also had the opportunity to write a poem. A decade or so ago, I was a "poet," in that I wrote poetry nearly every day. It was my "thing." I haven't written a poem in three years, and only a handful in the last ten. One of my mentors at Albany, Don Byrd, a poet and philosopher himself, once told me that he couldn't work on both poetry and philosophy at the same time. Trying to work through philosophical concepts interfered with writing poetry, those concepts had to distill in the mind over a period of time before they could become a source for poetry.

I think that's been the case for me.  But it was interesting to find myself in the middle of poem, to find that my method had refined itself but generally still operated.

Anyway, I've attached the poem (I would have posted it directly, but I didn't want to bother doing the HTML to layout the poem properly). I'd appreciate any feedback.

idyll_winter_engine.pdf