You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2007.
OK, that is a bit of strange blog post. I’ll call it my 90s band name post where you take two random words, mash them together and come up with a band name. I just found this nifty little blog band name generator, typed in my name and came up with: The Hindu Vamps. Excellent. I knew that the lack of a good band name was the only thing holding up my musical career. No, it would have absolutely nothing to do with any lack of musical skill.
At any rate, Suw and I along with friends Phil, Fiona and Karina took a walk in the Chilterns yesterday. Really wonderful walk. The bluebells were out, and the forest floor was blanketed with these gorgeous blue flowers. Getting out of London was just what I needed. I am still not used to this English concept where walking in the country always ends up at a lovely pub. I think more Americans (and I am one for those who don’t know) would take up walking if it was from pub to pub, as is the case here in England.
Ghosts. Well, there are many kinds of ghosts, and I’ve been visited by a few today. I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts this morning on the way to work – the Village Voice’s Voicebox Noise from the Front. I immediately recognised the voice but had to Google some lyrics that I dimly remembered from a song I used to sing: Sweet Miranda brings me the wine. (I know what my long time friends are thinking. But that’s a ghost from an entirely other time.) Michael Penn! (Warning, that website is not only shiny, it’s also very confusing.) He’s the musical brother of Sean Penn. That brought back some memories. I used to be be able to sing almost every song off of the album March. Just looking at the lyrics to Innocent One, the fragment that came to mind this morning brings back a rush of images from the past.
And speaking of ghosts of another time and kind, I’m offering up prayers and other offerings to the tech gods as g4u – Ghost for Unix – tries to copy the contents of my old laptop hard drive to a new laptop hard drive. It’s an open-source version of Norton’s Ghost. It’s stopped at 8 gigs copied once already, but a second go is up to 14 gigs. Very promising, even if the drives are making very disturbing noises. Oh well, it’s time to go to sleep and see what ghosts visit me to close out this Monday that I could have done without.
Well, the Independent newspaper here in the UK (that would be as in independent of any journalistic credibility) has launched a campaign of unprecedented hysteria about the dangers of WiFi. There have been suggestions – without solid evidence, mostly extrapolation from studies on mobile phone radiation – that WiFi is causing bad behaviour in children. If WiFi were the root cause of bad behaviour in British school children, Suw would have killed me by now with our chef’s knife seeing as we have three WiFi hotspots in our postage stamp-sized flat in north London. Of course, the cause for bad behaviour could be a host of other things such as large class sizes resulting in high pupil-to-teacher ratios.
Ian Betteridge does a far better job than I possibly have time for today debunking this new public scare campaign. Ian puts the journalists feeding this nonsense to shame with a well reasoned post with actual facts, instead of baseless assertions and logical fallacies. Wow. Facts. Look folks, the ability to write flowing prose doesn’t mean you know jack about statistical analysis or science. It would appear that journalists (or the sources the quote) don’t “know the difference between high-frequency ionizing radiation – things like gamma rays emitted by a nuclear bomb – and non-ionizing radiation like radio waves”, as Ian points out. Although you’d think a fine liberal arts education that most journalists have would at least give them a basic grounding in rhetoric and logical fallacies.
Fallacy: Just because you don’t know something to be false doesn’t make it true. I find it ironic that this particular fallacy is called Argument from Ignorance.
Ouch! Honey, I promise to tidy up more. Really. Honest.
Raven Tor’s Tournament at Arundel Castle on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
With the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, I have been affected by the death of a celebrity, someone I never met but admired, more so than anyone since Miles Davis died. I was informed of Miles’ passing out of spite by a girlfriend in the dying days of the extended death throes of our relationship. I was a voracious reader of Kurt Vonnegut after discovering him at university through my good friend Chuck.
I’ve often felt that Vonnegut was like another American institution, The Simpsons. You can read Vonnegut purely for entertainment, but there are so many layers beneath a deceptively simple veneer. Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post talked about the contradictions of Vonngeut:
In person he had the same effect as in print: He could somehow chill you with stories of a cruel universe, yet leave you inspired. He made you think. He made you want to be a better person.
Of his books, I first read Cat’s Cradle and then devoured much of the rest of his catalogue. If you’re unfamiliar with that apocalyptic book, scientists created a form of water that froze at much higher temperatures than zero, actually 45.8 degrees Celsius), called ice-nine. The seed crystal was unleashed and the world destroyed. I found out from a college chemistry teacher that there were several crystals of water that froze above 0 degrees Celsius, but not one of them had ever been called ice-nine because of Cat’s Cradle.
The books had a huge influence on my life. I remember reading Bluebeard when I was at university. In it, there is an illustrator turned abstract expressionist painter. It introduced to me to the work of Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. Also, it framed a debate in my own mind that was only reinforced by the passing barb from an angry friend when she said to me: “You’re not a writer. You’re just a journalist.” In the book, the main character can paint in exquisite detail, but his skill passes from creativity into a too precise realism drained of passion and creativity. It’s an internal debate that I continue to this day whether I’m a writer or somehow just slightly above a court reporter, a fast typist.
Both Miles and Kurt Vonnegut were born in the Midwest, where I’m from. As a matter of fact, Miles was born in southern Illinois, my home state. It seems only right to end with a Vonnegut quote that bridges both his writing and the music of Miles. Vonnegut was a humanist and took over the presidency of the American humanist society from Isaac Asimov. Last autumn, he said:
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC
technorati tags:Vonnegut, Miles Davis, RIP
On one of my websites now almost 10 years old that I haven’t updated in five years, I quote Edward Abbey from Desert Solitaire:
This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.
For Abbey, his one place on earth, his soul place, was slickrock desert of Utah, that glorious red sandstone that glows like fire in the setting sun. It is indeed a beautiful place. I’ve feel blessed that I’ve seen so many beautiful places. I’ve hiked 60 miles across Glacier National Park in Montana. I’ve walked over the Continental Divide up above Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park and along the Divide from Wolf Creek Pass in southern Colorado. My father claims I tried to kill him on a day hike in Canyonlands. I just didn’t make sure that he drank enough water, and he got spooked by the rattlesnake that he almost stepped on.
I had to pull my friend Alain out of a crevasse in a glacier in Alaska. We were hiking in the Wrangell-St Elias National Park, and Alain accidentally dropped his pack down the icy gap. We weren’t really prepared for walking on glaciers, and an ice axe or two would have really helped. We lived to tell about it back in the bars in Anchorage.
I get asked a lot by friends here in London whether I miss the States and what I miss. Yes, I do miss the States. For one, it’s home, and everyone misses home in some way or another. But there is also nothing quite like the overwhelming space here in Europe. Yes, the Alps are stunning, and the countryside is beautiful and charming. But there is nothing like the big sky of Montana. The space is a physical feeling of possibility. And while the highlands of Scotland and Wales feel wild, there is nothing so raw as the millions of square kilometers of mountains and wilderness.
In an odd contradiction of technology and an ever present reminder of my spiritual connection to the wild places of home, I carry the text of Wallace Stegner’s Wilderness Letter on my Palm T3. I love the closing lines:
We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
Hope. Over the years, one of the most important lessons a person can learn is how to stay sane in this absolutely insane world. For me, I go walking in the mountains. Sometimes by myself, and sometimes with a close friend. I don’t think that a human being can stay sane unless they are left some hope. Life without hope is just a desperate sleep walk, a numb shuffle through what should be a daily miracle. As Woody Guthrie said, “About all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine.”
Here’s hoping that tomorrow is a better day, and eventually that the road leads home.
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