To all the haters out there

Hell, you fuckers
Take your confusion and go.

The devil will pinch your ass for you
if that's what you want.

Don't pretend like I didn't mean it -
or stopped making sense -
the onus is on you too.

If I did stop, it's up to you to stop;
if I did stop, it's up to you to start again;
if I did stop, I stopped
and you were there
or you weren't there with me -
whatever -

I'm meaningless to you anyway.
I mean to be mean
because if meaning is what I do
then I'm going to mean damn well
everything that I say.

Is it possible?

must poetry be meant for Outsiders
because it means most to them

but if the Others stepped outside
(if ever we see it again)
would it....that I'd be able to hear us
just like them

My Dialectics (between something here and somewhere else)

kids are eleven
circling around streetlamps, waiting-
waiting to get high, circling,
waiting, hanging, talking,

finally, a sigh.

We dive into the sky
above the city filled with smoke and air, flying like
a few soft luftballons.
One very asthmatic girl is struggling to keep up and hopes that no one notices;
with no mind, she can see the tops of people's heads, how their cowlicks swirl out from the center, how they compose themselves in mirrors and in line at the pharmacy, how they are easily confused.
Our boy, like a scientist, observes everything but keeps his mind in check...from going to the dark place, that is...death and the future...and on what must be here now.
And the one who goes off - me - I'm going into a space where no one can follow.

the Void

I see it in my spiral-headed friends - coughing babies - old eyes hiding from Years as they march into the Rat-Hole
all just for trying to get higher, into the atmosphere, comfortable away from home.

the kids are eleven (and twelve now
and one tonight is striking thirteen)
and they're striving to get high
"Why, why don't we care why?"
We all philosophize, sometimes;
it's regrettable,
like losing your keys in a crack.
Forget all your questions and come back to the streets where
the pennies linger many among the people of the earth -
then, I think, back on Earth
"We'll get something right eventually."

My dialectics are
(the pennies between here and there)
Oedipus/Antigone, each one is a child;
Echo/Narcissus, each one a lover;
Sisyphus/the Stone, each one is the other.

Laying low with my Kindle

A 10 oz. white rectangle lays low on my coffee table. It's small and thin - I suppose it resembles a certain ubiquitous device made by a certain ubiquitous computer company (that has become all too ubiquitous recently, in my humble opinion), though it has a somewhat primitive-looking keyboard, no backlit display, and doesn't fit into the palm of your hand.

If that doesn't really sound very impressive, then you shouldn't be surprised. The Amazon Kindle is not an iPod or a iPhone, though it does have aspects of both devices. And although the Kindle may be belittled for failing in all the aspects where those devices succeed, it is really its own animal and deserves to be taken on its own merits. Because what the Kindle does well, it does really REALLY well.

I'll begin this with an admission: the iPhone is pretty much incredible. It is a phone, a web-browser, a portable e-mail inbox, an internet television, a jukebox and chock full of bizarre little games to pass the time. It does all that with an interesting and intuitive user interface and somehow manages to fit into your front pants pocket. In my opinion, this thing begs to be used constantly. With all those features, don't most other activities seem kind of bland?
In the backpacker's guide to civilized life in America, the iPhone is like the Swiss army knife of the tech-savvy (portable, effective, multi-featured) and the Kindle is a like a really good hunting knife (which means its really good at one thing, i.e. cutting shit). So, although it might sound stupid and contrarian of me to say so, if the Kindle actually were more impressive, it would be a failure.

Reading is a passionate activity for many people, but people don't want it to demand their attention. So, while I will mention some of the number of secondary features of the Kindle, some of which don't succeed very well, and others which succeed exceedingly well, I'd like to spend more of my time on one aspect. In my opinion, this one basic principle is going to determine your need to immediately go out and get one of these suckers (and no, you don't need to physically go out - they're only available on Amazon).

It's all based on your answer to the question, "Do you like to read?" As stated by Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, the Kindle is designed for the consumer demographic of "heavy readers." Now, I suppose this designation is a tad ambiguous, given that a relative comparison to other Americans' reading habits could mean that anything more than one book a year is a "heavy reader" - if that's true, then I'm a candidate for World's Strongest Man). But whatever - I think that the basic concern is something like you have a general enjoyment of reading and, perhaps, you even have the desire to read more than you already do.

So, if that fits you, you've already fulfilled the most important criterion for whether this hip new technology is for you. The Kindle makes the activity of reading more portable and more accessible than it could ever be with traditional books. Now, I hesitate to add "more fun" to this list because I would be skeptical of anyone who said it was somehow "more fun" to read a digital book than a real one (I'd say it's about as fun or less so than reading a regular book, depending on the intensity of your devotion to experiencing each fiber of the paper or examining the weaving in the bind, etc. - which might be a legitimate concern to some of us (nerds). And I might be one of those people. But obviously, I love my Kindle, so there's still got to be a good reason for buying one. See below.)

We're talking about the ability to carry around upwards of 1500 books on your Kindle - and it's not going to get any heavier or bulkier. I think that's important especially because a big part of how I read (and I think this applies to many folks out there) was based on my ability to pick something up or carry it around with me. Why do you suppose I never got around to reading War and Peace? Or any novel by Tolstoy for that matter? When it comes to reading, size definitely matters. And my ability to pick up Anna Karenina at any point in time is going to substantially increase the chances of my reading it. Furthermore, the Kindle features an automatic bookmark that, if you switch books at any point, the Kindle saves the place where you stopped and returns you there when you reopen it.

The accessibility is also important in the thickness of a book is also very likely to influence my decision to start in on the project to begin with. There seems to be something disingenuous about picking up a copy of Crime and Punishment without the committed intention of eventually finishing it. But the Kindle is accessible in the sense that it makes it incredibly easy to begin something without making that kind of intense commitment, and it is just as simple to switch to something else if you don't find it to your liking. That kind of flexibility is important in reading because it makes the activity of reading easy to engage in, even though the texts you read may not be.

I'd like to make a note to my international friends that may read this. The Kindle's instant access to hundreds of thousands of pieces of literature is really only functional in America at this point - which is just the disappointment of being a 2nd generation piece of equipment created by a company that specializes in shopping, not designing consumer electronics. Disappointing, I know, but hopefully the Kindle's interface will become the standard for all ebook readers and it will spread relatively quickly around the industry.

Other interesting (but ultimately less successful) features of note include:

MP3 player: You can upload mp3 files to the Kindle and play them while you read books. However, there doesn't seem to be a feature for seeing a library of your music files, and as such they are always played in shuffle mode. That means you can't use the Kindle for digital audiobooks just yet, unless you would like to assemble each chapter from random order into a continuous narrative - you're so postmodern!

Web-browser: The Kindle has an experimental web browser. It's experimental in the sense that you can perform Google searches, check e-mail, or do any other general text-based internet functions. But you're not going to be able to download any files on it, unless they are Kindle books or ebooks in other select formats (MobiPocket [.mobi] is the other popular one that I know of). The point here is, the Kindle is ultimately not a very successful web-browser, though it could get you by in a pinch. And the free internet access is certainly nothing to sneeze at.

Text-to-Speech: This is not your middle-school SimpleText program. It does a pretty accurate job of pronouncing each word, albeit with a slight Norwegian accent (props to David Pogue for nailing that clever and accurate comparison). It can be helpful if you need to give yourself a rest and just want to listen while following along in the text. But mostly, in my opinion, this feature is just a little embarrassing. I'm not exactly sure who thought this was a great idea at this point in the technology, but maybe it will provide a working basis for improving it later.

But, even these features aside, I still think the Kindle is absolutely fantastic. The e-Ink (electronic ink) display reads much easier and draws way less energy than the backlit iPhone - so for all you iPhone users who claim to be able to read e-books on the iPhone, stop deluding yourselves - that tiny display is never going to be better than the Kindle, much less any electronic reader with an e-Ink display. Obviously, the big sticking point is going to be the fact that the e-Ink only displays black and white and 16 shades of gray on the Kindle, but it still displays pretty good B&W photos and supposedly the technology for a color e-Ink display is currently being developed.

Another sticking point is going to be the price ($359 alone, +$29 for leather cover [you should probably get this just to mitigate the risk of cracking the display, +$65 2-year warranty), which is still pretty high in my opinion, especially given only these mediocre features in addition to its abilities for basic reading. Plus the ebooks from the Kindle store are generally around $10, delivered wirelessly to your Kindle in about a minute and backed up on Amazon.com for free. But, to get around this, I've discovered a great little website with 23,000 ebooks and growing that are all available for free - manybooks.net . This website offers, in Kindle-ready format, works of classic literature, philosophy, science, religion, etc. which are out of the public domain and therefore freely accessible and distributable via the web. So, not only can you search their database on your computer, download whatever you like (Joyce, Aristotle, Einstein, Shelley, et al.), and then upload them to the Kindle via USB - as if that weren't good enough - but they also have a mobile website that you can browse on your Kindle via the web-browser and download wirelessly for free as well! Now that's instant access to a world of knowledge if I've ever seen it. No more need to buy random Barnes & Noble copies of Thus Spake Zarathustra - it's accessible at any point where you find yourself in need of the existential advices of a fictional character.

So I think that pretty much covers the main points. I do want to take a moment to emphasize that we should not see the Kindle (or ebook readers, in general) as a replacement for books. There are certain physical qualities of a unique copy of a book that will never be reproduced in digital form, and, in that way, loving an ebook is much harder than loving a "aBook" (short for analog book and much less confusing than "book," "real book" or "book book," as I've toyed with using). But the point is that the Kindle is going to give you a much vaster library of literature to read and a very accessible format for doing it, and thus, a greater opportunity to read more and read more of what you want - not just what you have.

So while I would say the Kindle may be slightly less cool than an iPhone because it is much less versatile, I must say that it succeeds because of its simplicity. This is thing for reading. And when I want to read, I can't think of anything better than a device that focuses on that and doesn't try to interrupt with phone calls or emails or all the other distractions out there. The point is: the Kindle is not there to make a lot of noise; instead, it makes simple, beautiful music.

a tele-vision from election night

frenetic glut
data electric
information-like drops collect
on the screen: the window through which we
see the world - through which we smell and
reality smells like
hot electronics and expanding plastic.

O B A M A

how does paper translate to power?
why did we give our vote away?
A president is a peacock
Why are the poets so dark today?

The news weaves a hypnotic circle, the people are moving images, the numbers a trembling cloud, the ads like children dancing on screen, the mouths are flapping flags, the trees outside are inside the home, the home is a delicate thing, the children a new grip of votes, a dream deferred to a dream, the lights are pixels of corn the corn is growing like midnight oil, time is on Bonody's side, the heart is a box of flowers, Americans eat a new day for breakfast, change is scattered on the street, the poll is a circle red white and blue, words fall off forever but we keep going on and on and on

We want to marry my country
I want to marry something else
I want to marry myself.
I want to be whole again.

A Response to an Aspect of an Excerpt of “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

A Response to an Aspect of an Excerpt of “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

“Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different...In perhaps the most neutral way of describing this difference between their culture and ours would be to say that we have a discourse form structured in terms of battle and they have one structured in terms of dance. This is an example of what it means for a metaphorical concept, namely, ARGUMENT IS WAR, to structure (at least in part) what we do and how we understand what we are doing when we argue.”

http://theliterarylink.com/metaphors.html

A concept with two structures

But would this other culture translate their dancing discourse form as “argument”? Wouldn’t we want to say that this is an entirely different concept than “argument” and thus come up with some other word for it? This seems to be a fundamental problem with the thesis in this book: it seems to suggest that one concept (“argument,” in this case) may be interpreted differently between two languages.
Similar to Steven Pinker’s theory in “The Language Instinct,” these two cognitive scientists claim that there is a language of the mind which articulates pure “concepts” and which is different from any particular language. But the process which the authors of Metaphors We Live By are describing works “backwards” from Pinker’s; in this book, the language by which we use to describe something inherently structures the way we understand the concepts.*

In a way, the authors’ theory resembles another theory by one of Pinker’s self-described antagonists: Benjamin Whorf (co-author of the infamous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Whorf suggested that language could not be distinguished from thought, that a person’s language (like English, Russian, Hindi, etc.) will limit the range of thoughts one can actually have. If the metaphors we live by actually structure our concepts, then it appears that our thoughts may be entirely limited to how we can express them in our language. If we do not describe the concept of argument in terms of a “dance,” then we will have no understanding of the concept as such. However, I have a question for the authors: can we begin to apply a description of argument in terms of a dance and still be describing the same concept?

Let us look at the different example of an "argument". In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates investigates the beliefs of his friends and fellow citizens in a dialectic. But let us look close at the way these arguments progress. The style is not often confrontational, and from a certain perspective, it is not meant to be. Socrates is investigating the nature of the claims, not necessarily attacking them, but turning them around in his mind and the minds of the others. Someone suggests a new idea or hypothesis and Socrates goes about investigating that with them as well. Secondly, none of these dialogues result in a clear winner or loser. The characters end their discussion because they must go off to some other required activity. Furthermore, from a literary standpoint, the purpose of these dialogues was not to show the reader which person was the victor and which was the loser; rather, the purpose is to result in a state of aporia for the reader, a kind of zen-like point of recognizing one’s own ignorance. Plato’s work is often more like literature than an argument, because it illustrates different ideas without giving claim to any one hypothesis as the clear winner. In such a way, we might begin to see this dialogue as a kind of dance that we are supposed to watch, marveling at the moves that each participant makes individually, and how they work in concert, and how the dialectic rises and falls and climaxes and ends, without any one participant supposedly winning over the other.

Can we apply the concept of argument to Plato's dialogues, when it seems to be so fundamentally tied to war? Is it possible for us, or any other culture for that matter, to come up with another way of describing the concept of argument in some other terms (i.e. argument is a dance)? If my illustration of Plato’s dialogues is in any way correct, then I think we would be more willing to say that we could not apply the concept of argument to this example. Rather, in presenting the discussion as Plato does, he is presenting something to which we must apply some other related concept.

*What is the basic argument of these two? What are the premises? For Lakoff and Johnson: We have concepts in the mind; the concepts in the mind must be expressed in language; the way we express concepts in language structures our understanding of them ("Structures understanding of concepts?" See next section). For Pinker: We have concepts in the mind; the concepts must be expressed in language; the way we express concepts in language is an illustration of how we understand them.

A concept of a concept?

What may be different about a concept and our understanding of a concept? At first suggestion, it seems like they must be one in the same: concepts represent our understanding of some “thing” in the world. Given that understanding, it sounds like Lakoff and Johnson are suggesting that we need to reinterpret our concepts, that we may actually have a “concept of a concept.”

But barring some major misunderstanding by the authors, this is probably not the case. For if we have concepts before we understand what they are, where do they come from? Having largely dispensed with the hypothesis of innate ideas from the era of Locke and other empiricists, it seems reasonable to believe that concepts are created in the mind through experience. But can an experience of something actually give us a concept of it? From the bare nature of experience, we may see two people facing each other, hear their words directed to each other, gather from the meaning of the statements they are making that they are referring to and investigating the statements of each other. But this does not get us as far as the concept of an argument. From such a rudimentary description, we merely seem to have a concept of dialogue or discussion.

But it is only when we utilize some metaphorical language to describe this situation that we begin to get a concept of something as specific as an argument. As the authors suggest, argument is often described using the language of war, and in some ways it is essential to structuring our understanding of an argument. But we do not get this conception of argument without using the language of war. The authors seem to suggest that our use of language works as the kind of practice from which we officially formulate our concepts. Having an experience of something is not the same as having a concept of that thing. We may witness an argument at any time, but it is only when we begin to describe that experience that we actually begin to formulate a concept of argument. Thus, the authors suggest that concepts are formulated through a process of what we might call “raw experience” (though this may include more than just sense data) and the experience of using language.

How does this play into the acceptability of the authors’ thesis?

Let me speculate for a moment about the relation between language and how humans formulate these things called “concepts.” From my rudimentary biological understanding of how the brain works, any momentary sensation is transferred from the originating nerve to a part of the brain where it registers as a feeling. The experience is alone, it is fleeting, and unless it is significant or traumatic, the experience will not make any sort of impression. However, by retracing that experience through the medium of language, and abstracting it from one particular experience, we are creating connections in the brain that are lasting which seems to be the necessity behind a concept as some kind of collection of experience which sticks in the mind and may be referred to at any later time. According to this understanding of the biological function of the brain, we can see how it would be necessary to describe something in language, or be able to describe something in language, in order to have a concept of it.

Thus, it does not seem entirely out of place to suggest that language is necessary to have understanding. But I think we may rightly question whether we can have a mutually-consistent concept like argument which one culture describes in terms of war and which another describes in terms of dance. This is a basic problem of translation. Since we may understand argument in terms of a war, but we come upon a description of a discourse with some of the same features as an argument but which is described in terms of dance, we may find it better to use a word that does not carry with it this distinction, especially since terms of war would undermine the original concept being expressed. If one culture describes some discussion in terms of a dance, then it seems incorrect to apply to it the name of argument. We might want to maintain at least the original word or phrase used in the translation in order to prevent the dissociation between understanding the original meaning of the text and some other understanding of the text. Or we may use a similar word like dialectic which contains a less antithetical metaphorical structure to the concept of argument.

The authors’ thesis is not unhelpful, though. It is especially useful in understanding the conundrum of the translator or concerns with reading a text in translation. If translations attempt to convey the meaning of the original text in a new language, then the authors thesis suggests that we should be concerned about the metaphors which are used to communicate the original concepts and attempt to preserve them as part and parcel with the original meaning. Thus, I think we should be concerned when the authors start comparing an example of a culture which has a discourse form based on the language of war, while another’s is based on the language of dance. Though they do not explicitly state it, I am concerned that the authors mean to suggest that these two discourse forms are the same concept though structured differently by their respective metaphors.