Some good things to do with an Internet addiction
"The Joy of Quiet," a story by Pico Iyer in the NY Times (29 Dec. 2011) resonates with something I proposed a week ago at a Christmas party.
.
I'd been talking about plans to go away for a few weeks to finish a novel in draft. As usual, when such an idea is broached, people were quick to say things such as, "Hey, I know a great place on the coast down south" or "My uncle has a yacht crewed entirely by world-class lady beach volleyball players winding down between tournaments." That kind of thing is all very well, but what I really need is somewhere barren of interesting people to chat to (including beach volleyball players), at least one room with a blank wall and no view of wonderful scenery and, most important of all, no Internet connection. In fact, I'd been thinking of some grubby little upcountry hotel here in Thailand.
This is not mere eccentricity. Lots of writers feel the same way, I believe. At least one successful writer (whose name escape me just now) goes so far as to say no one can write a book in the vicinity of an Internet connection. That may be no exaggeration.
At this point my Sara, as is her wont, interrupts. "All you need is self-discipline," she says.
Uh-huh. That's right. I don't even have the self-discipline to activate Freedom, a program I installed on my computers that allows you to disable your communications programs for anywhere up to eight hours at a time (see “Addictions, spinal deficiencies and disciplinary infinite regresses”).
But let's get back to my proposal, which will make both me and some obliging investor rich overnight. All I need is enough cash to buy and renovate a smallish hotel, preferably here in Bangkok.
Here's the deal. We subdivide the joint into windowless cells, each of them equipped with comfortable office chair, desk, adjustable lighting, cot, a basic toilet and washroom, coffee machine, and, by default, no Internet connection. Oh, yeah--and a solid door that unlocks only from the outside.
Just a prototype; we'd tart it up somewhat.
Whoa. We’ll have writers queuing up to pay our exorbitant rates for incarceration till they finish their book in draft or else cry uncle (for which we’ll charge them a hefty penalty). The punters can order food which, for modest charges, our staff will slip through a slot of the sort used in solitary confinement in all the best prisons. Writing supplies, computer repairs, etc. will be provided in the same way.
The real money, though—and this, I have to admit, is pure genius—will come from what we'll charge for temporary access to the Internet. Clients who just can't manage the cold-turkey route may submit a formal written request, agreeing to pay ridiculous sums by the minute for the privilege of being allowed online for a stipulated time. (Of course clients will also have to sign an initial agreement that protects us from charges of kidnapping and unlawful detention.)
So we provide a much-needed service for our age, amassing heaps of good karma at the same time we get obscenely rich.
This idea’s time has come. As I read Pico Iyer’s article, I kept feeling he was on the verge of stumbling upon it himself. I await good news from prospective investors.
Any good ideas for what to call this facility, which in my mind is already becoming an international chain? Mistress Muse's No Mercy Mansion isn't quite right, though it is pretty alliterative.
Mayan malarkey, reasons to relax in 2012
So what's new?
Whoop, whoop. The end is nigh, the end is nigh! I'm told the ancient Mayans predicted that massive quantities of bad shit will hit the global fan this year.
Whatever, eh? It looks as though the Horsemen of the Apocalypse got a way early start on things, because it they’ve been galloping through our gardens for quite some time already.
I've experienced a wee taste of this myself. In fact it started around 7am on New Year’s Day last year, when one of the exercise machines downstairs tried to kill me (see “Life is terrifying”). That was pretty auspicious. In fact, given the 12 months’ of troubled times that ensued, the horrors this incident portended for yours truly may have leaked out into the world at large.
But once again, despite all historical evidence to the contrary, I turn a happy face towards the coming year, and wish you a good one. Hey, slower to learn than your average lab rat, I’ll even wish you a very happy morning after the New Year’s celebrations tonight.
Gossip takes awhile to mature
If you keep up with the news, of course, you can find plenty of likely reasons to head for the storm shelter. But I have a friend—a distinguished classics scholar, Egyptologist, linguist, coiner of neologisms extraordinaire, and roll and roll/blues/jazz musician—who once told me that he didn’t really follow the news. In fact, he said, he wasn’t all that interested in anything reported more recently than three centuries ago. What he meant, I believe, was that what we call “current affairs” is mostly gossip, written on the wind. This is probably even truer now that it was all those years ago, when he told me this. Even more than then, we are subjected to an overwhelming barrage of information, among other things “news” as spectacle, the latest foofaraw selected and shaped for its entertainment and hence commercial value. What’s really important, however, typically takes centuries of rumination and discussion before we recognize it as such and dare try to interpret it in the light of truly important themes and issues.
Given the way technological and social/cultural change is accelerating, mind you, we probably don’t have 300 years to let things steep before we see what we’ve really got. We probably don’t have 30 years.
No big deal, though.
Genesis 2.0
Have a look at this short article: “How a mental disorder opened up an invisible world of colour and pattern.” Could it simply be that Louis Wain and God were both doodlers? That would explain a lot about our universe, eh? Maybe the apparent fractal nature of our world is nothing but an especially elaborate doodle. (More than reflecting any essential character of reality, it could merely reflect something inherent in the structure of doodling itself, should you begin a given doodle in a particular way.)
Hey, and in the Beginning, our Lord was subjected to call-waiting on a truly cosmic scale, and in the course of time he was connected. Then he looked down at his (pretty advanced) scratchpad and he said, "Lo and behold. What hath I wrought here? Far out."
Genesis 2.0: In the beginning, God created a doodle, and He saw that it was good. And forever afterwards humankind, which lived in this universe that was a doodle, took many essentially trivial things way too seriously. A happy thought for the new year.
And, yes, it may well be that the pounding in your head foretells the approach of those Horsemen of the Apocalypse. More likely, though, it's only a hangover.
Save the semicolons
“[U]se of the semicolon is dwindling. Although colons were common as early as the 14th century, the semicolon was rare in English books before the 17th century. It has always been regarded as a useful hybrid—a separator that's also a connector—but it's a trinket beloved of people who want to show that they went to the right school.”
Henry Hitchings, “Is This the Future of Punctuation!?” (Wall Street Journal, 22 Oct. 2011)
Rightfully, I think, there's been a reaction to the venerable prescriptive school of grammar and punctuation. The modern tendency is to go instead with current usage. But some people — and Hitchings might be one of them, if I read his attitude to semicolons correctly — go too far with that. Perhaps what he really meant has been corrupted in its editing. I can’t believe that someone with his background and evident writing skills could describe the semicolon as a mere “trinket beloved of people who want to show that they went to the right school.”
I’m all for minimalism in most spheres of this life; and in no way would I advocate unnecessary and obtrusive punctuation merely on the grounds that I attended Grenville High School, in Quebec, where I was suspended for offenses that modesty forbids I specify. (The year I was in Grade 9, just incidentally, the teachers’ association declared Grenville High the worst school in the entire province and barred Association teachers, i.e. any officially qualified teachers, from teaching there.)
But letting the semicolon go officially extinct would mean competent writers lose a valuable tool for no other reason than pundits yield to current popular taste. The way things are going, we could be left with little more than a few Anglo-Saxon grunts ornamented with full stops, question marks and—for the few writers who still use relatively complex sentences and don’t mind appearing affected—commas. Oh, I forgot!!! And exclamation marks, those handy and hugely popular vehicles of spurious verve and melodrama à la mode. (Doesn’t matter. Whatever. Emoticons are meanwhile threatening to relegate words and punctuation to wherever the dodos have gone.) Mass criteria of the good rool, OK!
I use semicolons sparingly. I'm in no way emotionally attached to them. Used appropriately, however, they make essential contributions to clear prose. Hitchings’ apparent belief that the semicolon is nothing but an affectation among a few ponces is utter rubbish.
Where current usage can be shown to be destructive of effective prose, then it should be resisted. Semicolons rool, OK!
Here are some surplus semicolons I avoided using in the foregoing: ;;;;;;;;;. Help yourself.
Assailed once again by the notion I should instead be working on a novel, I offer a brace of haikus.
Disambiguate
Complex items in a list,
Good semicolons
Disambiguate.
As in: “Punctuation clarifies prose by establishing logical relations, e.g. in distinguishing defining from non-defining relative clauses; by reflecting spoken language, with its pauses for breath or dramatic effect, e.g., or by evoking tones of interrogation, surprise, disbelief, and so on; and simply by providing a rest for short-term memory and attention when a sentence starts going stylistically all Hegelian on you.” Try reading that without the semicolons.
Or in this case (I know we could have two sentences instead, but considerations of meaning or rhythm can mean the semi-colon is better): “He went through the manuscript of ‘How You Know When You’ve Finished Revising,’ culling commas where he could; later in the day, he went back and reinstalled most of them. Then he sent it away.”
Thus:
Middle way
To stop or only to pause?
Good semicolons
Find the middle way.
...
The Wal-Mart sign (above) is meant to be ironic, isn't it?
Chronicle of an urban drowning foretold
Almost exactly a year ago I posted “Submarine garrets for starving writers” (4 November 2010), which foresaw the entire city of Bangkok serving as a recreational dive site. And that piece itself contained a link to an article ("One Born Every Minute") I wrote 25 years ago wherein I interviewed a visiting extraterrestrial who foresaw the submersion of Bangkok within another three decades. The TAT (Tourism Authority of Thailand), I suggested, would hail his proposals for turning this to advantage. 
I’ve also anticipated a submerged Bangkok in MOM, my most recent novel (Amazon, Smashwords), which is set about 50 years in the future. (I should say that the excerpt below isn’t representative of the book’s overall pace or point of view, which includes much more action from several other POVs. Once in a while, though, we get an installment of Leary’s ruminative Chronicle.)
From MOM, a novel.
full of it
(a chronicle of Leary’s second half-century and beyond)
Leary here. It’s Monday again. Seems like it’s Monday half the time, these days. And on Mondays I’ve got nothing to do except scribble these notes, for whatever that’s worth, and putter around my apartment, never mind my apartment can look after itself without any help from me.
I get lonely sometimes. I get lonely a lot, truth be told. For one thing, it looks like I’m the last person in this cell. For all I know, I could be the last one in ESSEA. Which is kind of scary. Maybe I’m being saved for something, though it’s hard to say what that might be. I’m an anomaly. That’s a fine word, and it means out of place. Like the Baiyoke Tower, which is all you can see of Bangkok these days. In fact that’s pretty much all that’s left of the entire Eastern Seaboard, Southeast Asia. ESSEA.
Guess what I’m doing for excitement right now, aside from chewing on a tasteless substitute for beef jerky. I’m looking out my window. Me and Rexy. My robopet. I neutralized the holoport — goodbye Waikiki — and telescoped the view so I can see all the way to the Baiyoke II Tower. Ninety-four stories and up to its butt in seawater. The Baiyoke I is drowned, right up over its ears. I recall when the Baiyoke I was the tallest building in Bangkok. That was way back in the twentieth century when Bangkok was booming, and the local movers and shakers had a bad case of Singapore pecker envy. Not just in Bangkok. Right across Southeast Asia, everybody wanted the tallest skyscraper. Right across the world, come to that. But now there’s nothing standing where New York used to be except the Millennium Mall, what’s left of it. Old Singapore and the mall down there would be nothing but a bunch of highrises poking out of the sea by now, if there’s anything left at all. Of course the government there might have passed a law against the PlagueBot. Maybe busted it for chewing gum or peeing in the elevators. I doubt it, though. Haven’t heard from anybody down there in quite some time. Haven’t heard much from anybody anywhere, lately. Whatever. With no children getting born, it’s natural enough to see us dying off.
Just look over there, on the other side of the Baiyoke. Three cumulo-nimbus cloud towers stand side by side like giant mushrooms. Black and gray and smeared with red, which tells you the sky in the west, back on the other side of the mall, must be like fire. We’ve got these external monitors and, what with the mall perched up here on hundred-and-fifty-meter stilts the way it is, they let me see all the way east to Bangkok, to where Bangkok used to be, so why can’t they give me a look at what’s happening on the other side? I’m no meteorologist, but it’s strange. You’ve got hot, humid air condensing out there over the sea instead of over the mainland, the way it should do. The way it would have done in the old days. Who knows what’s really out there, though; it looks like sea, but who can tell?
Here I sit, dictating these notes to my wallscreen. Nothing better to do.
Be that as it may, writers are extinct. In fact, there aren’t many jobs of any description out there. MOM and her Dolls look after everything anyone needs. Pretty well everybody’s a welfare bum these days, but no one even remembers what a welfare bum is, so we can just go ahead and enjoy it. Though I tend to feel kind of useless. So would most people, if they stopped to think about it. But they don’t. They don’t dare to.
The Kid, now, there’s one man still doing a man’s job. I wonder if he knows how lucky that makes him.
*
Seascape by Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Flooded temple from wtaq.com.
Premature evacuations offend spirits of the place
Here on my eight-floor balcony, watching the sun retire across the river to the west, I can almost hear the waters advancing from Saphan Kwai. Or is that merely the kerfuffle of conflicting rumor? For weeks, here in Phya Thai District, we’ve awaited the floods from the north as they advance with glacial alacrity. One of the many rumors, inconsistently promulgated by government officials, was that we might well be spared altogether.
Ultimately, though, it seems the hi-so spirits of the place have been insufficiently propitiated. Or perhaps too many of the locals have succumbed to premature evacution (current phrase, not my coinage), their lack of faith offending our spiritual guardians. Because last night and this morning, Twittish wisdom had the flood arriving in front of Big C at Saphan Kwai. Since, however, we’ve been given to understand that this was not the flood proper, but only prophylactic pumping of the drains, and that the area is dry again.
Nevertheless, the inexorable tide of umpteen zillion Olympic swimming pools equivalent, the standard measure du jour, continues its near-imperceptible rush towards us. As it has been doing for weeks.
I’ve decided never, for any reason, to look at the Twitter feed again. Gossip is always a powerful stimulant, but in time of crisis Twitter is crack cocaine. In the good old days, people would just get on with life and, if a giant flood appeared, they’d say, whoa, a flood, and deal with it. When it passed, they’d get back to other matters.
Of course all that’s easy enough for me to say, still safe and air-conditioned in my apartment as I make guacamole, croques monsieur and salad with which to surprise Sara when she gets home from work already heartened by thoughts of that half bottle of wine in the fridge. Only a few kilometers from us, meanwhile, large numbers of people are suffering abject misery. (I fear that us relatively privileged folk hereabouts will suffer our real crisis only after the floods have abated, and the social, political and economic fallout hits us.)
Of course there’s every reason to believe our neighborhood will finally indeed be flooded within days. Though how deeply and for how long is anybody’s guess. If you want considered opinions ranging from no flood at all to 10-12cm to 1.5m standing from a few hours to a few weeks, consult #thaifloodeng, an amazing confluence in itself of observation and information from every source imaginable. Everything you need to know from subduing feral crocodiles in black water to whether the reported invasion of green mambas is for real or a hoax, from how to safely test standing water for electric current to how to volunteer for relief efforts.
Here are more standout photos of the flooding in Thailand from The Atlantic and the Boston Globe.
A graphic representation from Japan showing, as of 27 October, the Great Flood Monster about to gobble up Phya Thai District and other parts of so-far untouchable “inner Bangkok.” (The situation has become even direr since then, of course.)
People often respond to disaster with great good spirit and imagination. Here's a motorcycle modified for underwater excursions.
For more on the respective powers of myth and science in flood control, see the latest posting on Somtow's World.
First photo (above): “A resident pulls her belongings as she wades through her flooded neighborhood in Thon Buri outside Bangkok on October 28, 2011.” (Bazuki Muhammad/Reuters) From the Boston Globe.
Second photo “Children play in a flooded street in Sena district, Ayutthaya province, about 80 km (50 miles) north of Bangkok, on September 12, 2011…” (Reuters/Sukree Sukplang) From The Atlantic.
Karmic comeuppance impending
Bad karma comes knocking.
This is Thailand’s worst flood in 50 years and, judging only by the music and, perhaps, the fact that people didn’t have to check Twitter feeds every minute or so throughout, the 1942 version (video link) looked like lots more fun.
4.30pm. Mon. 24 October 2011. Up to the minute report from inner-city Bangkok (Soi Ari–Saphan Kwai).
A trickle of water is emerging from a drain on Phaholyothin Road in front of the Villa Ari complex; nothing else as far as I walked north. Walking east towards Khlong Prapas I found plenty of people building last-minute masonry walls in front of shophouses and suchlike. Khlong Prapas, richly brown and smelling of swamp, is surging seawards, but appears well short of spilling over. Blessedly, there’s been little rain these past days, and little predicted for the coming week.
Not to worry, in any case. I discover that the road along the canal is where tired taxi drivers go to sleep in their cars. How convenient. They'll now serve as an early-warning system— their radio despatchers can alert the FROC at the first incoming chorus of gurgles.
The houses on the other side of the road from the canal stand somewhat below the current water level. If it rose high enough to breach the above-the-embankment retaining walls, those people would suffer quite a dose of flooding indeed. Few of the houses have erected any defences beyond the burning of joss sticks; one especially affluent compound was having a wall erected.
There’s really only one real cause for alarm in my neighborhood. JS, a stubborn Englishman with a house on the next soi, a last hold-out, finally decided to move his car to high ground this afternoon.
In my inner-city neighborhood, the past few days have sometimes felt surreal. The weather’s been sunny, the streets are unusually clear of traffic, the birds are singing… It’s been downright idyllic. The local supermarkets even still stock food. (Though as of yesterday, latecomers were stuck with cases of Evian, all of the sensible bottled water having long since been grabbed up.) Yet all the while, only a few miles away, very large numbers of people are in misery. Farmers have lost their crops and had to flee their homes. Industrial workers are left without jobs or homes, their factories flooded and it’s anyone’s guess whether or when some will reopen. Some people are trapped up canals and rivers without supplies and rescue operations haven’t always had enough boats to reach them.
However unfair it may be, the guardian spirits of the hi-so may protect us after all, together with official flood relief operations that have concentrated on diverting the massive quantities of water from the north around the inner city and through the eastern and western suburbs. The areas north of the city, meanwhile, some of them already under water for several weeks, have (largely with good grace, it seems) served as catchment areas to protect the commercial and financial center of the country. Sound economic reasons are being advanced for this strategy, of course. And after the country dries out—in another month or two—we can expect to hear these reasons hotly defended against criticism from those who had to suffer more than they would otherwise have had to.
A special very wet hell for those who took too much and gave too little?
Sara, who's notoriously smarter than I am, is scuba diving in Khao Lak, way down south—kind of a theme vacation. I’ve elected to stay in Bangkok, in my eighth-floor eyrie, and pretend to accomplish constructive things.
Most of the time, though, I sit around feeling guilty, dithering about doing volunteer work stacking sandbags or helping evacuees with their stuff until it’s too dark to find my way to where I need to be. Besides which—and this isn’t mere self-serving rationalization—experience tells me my presence would set relief efforts back, instead of really helping. But the time each of my Thai co-workers in turn finishes the standard debriefing—where do I come from? Can I eat hot food? Do I have a Thai wife? How many children do I have?—the waters will have all run out to sea and we’ll be looking at a drought instead.
Though I did spend part of my Sunday helping an expat family move their (heavy) furniture upstairs, just as a precaution. And given my sense of civic responsibility plus good gastronomic judgment, I haven’t hoarded any Mama noodles, though I do have a pretty good stash of peanut butter and Japanese green tea.
Of course such flippancy is bound to lead to my karmic comeuppance, and I think I should just leave things there.
2011 flood photo: Daniel Berehulak - Getty.
Inverse relations and natural law (The Gospel According to Ellie)
Bangkok cinemas, some of them, have taken to offering movies in “4D.” Now the moving images are complemented with smells—certain colorful old cinemas, sadly gone now, were way ahead of them on that front. And you might get rumblings in your seat, though these are often now more in sync with events on the screen that the tremblors from street traffic outside used to be. Other effects include fog and drizzle and stuff they originally built cinemas to shield you from while you watched a movie.
So that’s one excuse for having seen the latest Transformers flick.
And today, on behalf of Leary, I promulgate the original Ellie’s Law:
The quality of a modern movie is inversely related to the quantity of money available to make it.
Two things, here. First, you’ve got the hi-tech toybox of special effects, and the idea that, if they’re there, you’ve got to use them. Then you’ve got the destruction-of-life-and-property and the special-effects indexes, and the pole is constantly being raised. Movies are rated, in Bangkok as elsewhere, by the collective weight of mashed vehicles (robots, spacecraft, whatever) and the splash radius of blood.
The upshot? You have a much better chance of seeing a good movie if the film-maker has nothing to rely on but the quality of the script, the acting and the directing -- as in low-budget films made in Ireland and Canada.
Leary tells me that Ellie, whom he likes to describe as a friggin' genius, has also applied the notion of inverse relations to natural laws of political behavior (notably in the USA and other countries she could mention at this time). Leary says I should feel free to include some of these laws in my draft of The Intelligent Politician’s Practical Handbook, and I present them here.
In so-called democracies—roughly speaking, systems of government incorporating elected representatives of the population—certain invariant laws and corollaries tend to obtain. (Leary says Ellie—did he mention she’s smart as a whip?—can talk this way at the drop of a hat, and often does.)
* The effectiveness of a political message is inversely related to the complexity of its content.
* The simplicity of a political message is inversely related to its connectedness with anything important it has to say about political, social and economic realities.
* In any so-called democracy, a political candidate's chance of success is inversely related to the complexity of his messages to the electorate, and directly related to their simplicity ( whether messages or electorate, you may be thinking).
Visitors may wish to add their own rules to this list.
Ellie is Leary’s second wife, the woman he married in 2029. She was driven to suicide by Brian Finister (a.k.a. Brian the Evil Canadian) circa 2035. Her subsequent resurrection as what was merely supposed to be a hi-rez ebee (electronic being), and Brian’s ultimate sex slave, actually heralded the next stage in evolution and helped to prove that evil genius’s undoing. (See MOM for the whole story.)
Creative word use, politicians, natural laws
In a recent post, "Get your new words while they're hot," we looked at neologisms that have appeared in these pages. Read on for more along those lines.
Back in March of this year Bill the Mathematician sent me to the “Church For Christ” site, which quoted Sarah Palin’s now-famous remark:
“We need to take this opportunity to talk about Jesus and rebute these lies and show people they cannot simply seek the truth, but how they can find the true Christ in the Bible.”
Bill the M. speculates that she wanted say “refute.” Or “rebut,” maybe even “rebuke.” But all you have to do is consult The Intelligent Politician’s Practical Handbook, Chapter 3, “Lexical legerdemain” (by yours truly, still in draft) to find the real answer. "Rebute" is a portmanteau expression including all the senses Bill suggested plus, most importantly, "reboot." But Palin prefers to deliver “reboot,” for reasons that remain obscure, with a Brit accent. The idea is that, if you reboot a lie (roughly “re-beaut”), it'll come out somehow better—more effective, at least, if not actually veridical.
Of course Sarah Palin has coined other fine neologisms. “Refudiate,” for one, has yet to fade from the popular consciousness. And, however much lexicographers remain reluctant to enshrine the word in official dictionaries, they do admire it, in one case going so far as to designate it “Word of the Year.”
‘The new Chambers Dictionary includes “freegan” and “geek chic,” and Merriam-Webster has recently added “staycation.” Not that lexicographers will include any word that swims into their ken: so far they’ve drawn the line at “refudiate,” though the editors of the Oxford American chose it for their 2010 Word of the Year.’
-- from “When a Dictionary Could Outrage,” by Geoffrey Nunberg (NY Times, 23 September 2011.)
Anyway, the important thing for me to take away from all this is an item for The Intelligent Politician’s Practical Handbook, Chapter 7, “Riffing reality”:
If you rebute (reboot/re-beaut) a lie, it can come out better. That is to say, whether or not the rebuted version is true, strictly speaking, it may at least be more effective.
Here’s a related article: “In praise of urban dictionaries,” (The Guardian, 21 April 2011) “Once scholars agonised for years over additions to language. Now, online dictionaries enable instant updates...”
Writerly occupational hazards: Emotional opportunism & spiritual callousing
Two years after his death, Michael Jackson is back in the news, with his former doctor defending himself against charges of involuntary manslaughter. I’m not sure what emotions this case is arousing in the general public, but it has caused me to revisit my first reaction to the so-called King of Pop’s untimely passing.
“A long time after painting [his first wife] Camille on her deathbed, Monet confessed to his friend Georges Clemenceau about the pain or shock he felt when he suddenly realized, while painting [Camille Monet sur son lit de mort] that he was studying her pallid face and noting the tiny variations of tone and color brought about by death, as if they were an observable everyday matter! He ended by saying: ‘Ainsi de la bête qui tourne sa meule. Plaignez-moi, mon ami.’ (Like the beast who turns his millstone. Pity me, my friend.)”
John Berger, “The Enveloping Air: Light and moment in Monet” (Harper’s, January 2011).
My own initial reaction to Michael Jackson’s death presented a real parallel to Monet's experience, and makes me question my own compassion.
Of course Jackson’s passing was sad—his whole life was sad, by many accounts. And what was my immediate response upon hearing the news? What a pity, I thought. I’d looked forward to seeing where his continuing reinvention of himself would eventually lead. But now I could no longer enjoy imagining the range of potential 80-year-old Jackson personae.
Does that strike you as callous?
Maybe. But, beyond his curiosity value, Jackon, effectively, was a leading exponent of a novel evolutionary development. Cultural evolution has long since superceded biological evolution. And now, what with advances in plastic surgery, bioengineering, and cyborg-type replacement parts and augmentations, human beings are increasingly taking a deliberate hand in their own design (and all this to much applause from the Transhumanists).
Which leads me to the following proposition. Jackson’s real contribution to posterity might have been this: He was our canary in what is becoming an ever deeper and more mysterious pit of our own devising, filled with perils we cannot yet see.
And now our canary is dead.
RIP MJ. I offer commemorative haikus (which, as I’ve said before, are much easier than writing books).
Michael Jackson, our
Tranhumanistic
Canary in a soul mine.
Michael Jackson, our
Commoditized
Ingenue in a gold mine.
Psychopharmacologic
Infelicity.
Michael Jackson, dead.
Psychopharmacologic
Alternative life-
Stylish Jackson death.
An eighty-year-old
New Michael Jackson
We’ll never know.
It occurs to me to ask: Will I be able to view myself with the same writerly dispassion, as I morph away over the years remaining to me? I’ve already had my eyes lasiked; not long ago I had a bathmat installed in my thorax (patching a ventral hernia, or containing the alien? ); there’s every chance that, should I live long enough, I’ll wind up the proud owner of artificial knees… Hell, they’ll probably be implanting info & communications chips right into our heads even before I get around to retiring my already antique, nearly four-year-old iPhone 2G.
Click on the first photo for a progressive portrait of Jackson over his life. (It has occurred to me that visitors often don't realize that many of the illustrations in these posts are linked to URLs.)
Get your new words while they’re hot (warm, anyway)
Watch the English language evolve! Here are some of this site’s neologisms—original, borrowed and even commissioned—from my posts over the past year or two. The numbers refer to how many hits each gets on Google as of right now.
* Cymbalalalazophobia (fashioned to order by Dr Anthony Alcock, coiner of words for our age extraordinaire). 0 hits (a big surprise) 
* Iktsuarpok (with thanks to the Inuit and to Adam Jacot de Boinod for collecting this specimen). 7,570 hits
* To cabbage (v. trans.) David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest). n/a (turns out there are other “cabbage” verbs, but I can’t find references to Wallace’s usage) 
* Hobologoism/ hobologoist (coined by yours truly, I am proud to report). 10 (they all lead to my site, mind you; but just wait till next year, eh?)
* Hi-so (from current Thai slang by way of English hi*gh so*ciety). 752,000,000 (but most instances refer to other things)
* The PlagueBot (a character in MOM). 16,500 (but others have coined versions, which muddies the waters; maybe I'll sue the buggers. Just joking.)
* iField (with apologies to Apple). 1,470,000 (subtract references to towns named Ifield)
* Vuvuzela (from S. Africa, quickly spread around the world on a tide of footie fever, but faded as fast from the popular mind). 11,600,000 (9,320,000 for “vuvuzela 2011,” so maybe it isn't fading as fast as all that)
* Democrazy (used in newspaper interview by former Thai Finance Minister Korn Chatikavanij, at a time, last year, when local demos had indeed gone patently crazy). 755,000 (the word is everywhere, and, just like its half-cognate, applied to all manner of things)
* Apocalyptic cosmophobia (me, looking forward to 2012). 3 (all my site)
* Beepification/ beepify (Leary’s coinage). 5 (only one of them referring to Leary; the expression has had multiple geneses)
* Absent presence (an expression for our times, coined a few years ago and likely to enjoy increasing currency over the years to come). 89,100,000
So that's it for now, with help from a scholarly friend, the South Africans, Inuit, and Thais, a writer or two, and a relic Boomer channelling from 50 years ahead. Stay tuned for more news of changes to the language, not to mention recommended changes.
The ghost portrait of David Foster Wallace brooding at the top of the page won't go away. I fear he's holding me in some way responsible for something.
Man for an age
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