Breaking the silence

Has my blog been quiet lately, or what? Last month, without really planning to, I took a break that quite frankly, began to look definitive. And this, National Poetry Month, no less -- both here and south of the border.

Work of late, freelance deadlines, tax deadlines, & personal stuff don't begin to account for my flagging interest. True, Facebook, and to a lesser extent Twitter, have siphoned off much audience and responsiveness... a phenonomenon that has been remarked upon by far more active and popular bloggers than moi-meme.  This blog, like many others, has gotten quiet. Look at all the goose eggs after postings below. Attention here, as everywhere, as been fragmented, diluted, dissolved by the sheer excess.

For a long time -- five years or so -- I've posted and crossposted for the love of it, to contribute in some humble way to the store of knowledge and reflection, the availability of certain poems and poets.  I've enjoyed the immediacy of layout, publication, and feedback -- the chance to hone critical skills, to write some things that evolved into articles elsewhere and even poems, to make some key social connections. It's been a good run.

But underlying the present ennui is a resentment:  why should the Great Pharoah Google reap all the profits (and those profits are indeed gargantuan) while we cyberslaves toil to build their palaces and pyramids? Now that they're scanning & photographing everything under the sun and even much of what's beyond it, I'm inclined to tell them to go fuck themselves.  And shove this humble contribution up their ass.  As for me, I'll go off and read books in print, write books in print, write my diaries in private (where I can vent without the shit hitting the fan), and cultivate real friendships with people whom I can speak to and touch.

With that, I press DELETE! 

Out, out, brief (electronic) candle! 

Such fun, rhetoric. 

For all that, I can still see that this blog will have its uses.  I've enjoyed writing this, for instance.  I've got a review coming up in the Rover:  some poems I don't have room for there, I'll post here. I've got a few good posts in hand.  Even as I feed the monster, I still find pleasure in sharing with whomever, whenever, through this medium. Yes, the slavemaster is gentle, if inexorable.  

Facebooking...

I'm on Facebook. Finally enough invites, persuasion and recommendation pulled me in. You can access my profile here. I see it can be indeed a powerful tool if you want to invite people to an event or whatever.

In the last 45 hours or so since I created my profile, I've acquired 51 FRIENDS. So it seems that I too am in the race to be the first to acquire a BILLION FRIENDS. Wanna be my FRIEND?

Of course, the whole "friends" thing is a silly misnomer -- it's Facebook contacts, really -- but despite myself, I find my feelings being manipulated by the fuzzy connotations. Like, suddenly I'm so POPULAR. At least, we're tapping each other electronically on the shoulder, so to speak.

I'm surprised by all the people who are on it -- some whom I would never expect. Clearly, in North America at least, I'm a relatively late adopter.

Facebook's friend-finding software can be quite uncanny. An old friend's site -- a fellow in Toronto who I went to university with, who I still keep in touch with from time to time -- came up quite early on, under "Suggestions"... and I hadn't even listed my interests, educational background, nada. (Still haven't.) On the strength of a few events, my bio perhaps? Anyway, Facebook tells me, NOW we are FRIENDS.

Update on the Kindle/Owell kerfuffle

People are also worried that the very architecture of network-connected devices like the Kindle, TiVo or iPod give tech companies unprecedented control over digital media and by extension, the free exchange of ideas.

Once upon a time, retailers sold customers a product and then walked away after the transaction. Today’s specialized devices often keep an umbilical cord to their vendor, loading updates and offering convenient ways to make purchases. These devices also limit the extent to which people can load independent software and customize their experiences.

Some of you may have noticed the new gadget on my sidebar: Yes indeed, hate to say, in the last day or so I've become a twit -- or, less self-deprecatingly, a

... or rather, tweeter. I'm a relatively late adopter of this -- scare quotes, anyone? -- "communications" "tool" -- but a number of people have asked me to become a "friend", so I decided to try it out to see what the "fuss" is all about. This business of "friends" is of course, quite ridiculous -- a true "friend" of mine once told me that after he opened such an account (well, it was actually a Facebook account, but same diff.), he soon had more "friends" than ever before, and never felt so lonely in his life. And frankly, up to now I just haven't had the stomach to learn yet another computer app.

The limitation -- 140 words -- is obvious. And the question too, the stuff of idiocy: What are you doing? Frankly, what I'm thinking is practically always a lot more interesting that what I'm doing. That's why I'm sitting at a computer. Of course, most of us so-called tweeters soon ignore that opening gambit and jot opinions, links, etc. (I did it from the very start.)

Call it Blogging Extra-lite. Nanoblogging. Net telegraph. (Actually, the official term is micro-blogging.) The appeal: well, it's not so wordy as all this goddamned blogging. At140 words, including hyperlinks, style -- or use of lengthy words, or even extraneous parentheses -- are quickly defenestrated. Yr as good as anyone els: 4 concision's sake, U soon start using sh frms. 2 spk., which is v. good for egalitsm.

The other thing, though, is that it's POPULAR. In two minutes, after announcing my recent review, a certain social connector who posts about ten times a day sent a big waoooh! and the word on to about 125 people. This blog, on the other hand, has become rather a quiet place. Does the sudden rise of twitter have anything to do with it?

Other indicators suggest that twittering is a passing fad that may soon be abandoned by all but a few stalwarts. (Like blogging, actually.) According a study referenced by this site, already more than half of all twitter accounts are inactive -- that is, haven't posted an update for at least week, and only 5% of tweeters account for 75% of tweets.

Maybe, though, with skillful use of tweets I can drag some twits -- err tweeters -- into this bog, rather blog. We'll see.

Busy this week...

...organizing a training session in school on technology in the classroom, doing in a QWF workshop leader application (which meant a time-consuming update of my literary CV -- the latest having been lost in the crash), and writing a review of Christiane Frenette's After the Red Night for the Montreal Review of Books -- my first paid reviewing gig. That's due at the end of the week, but since I'm flying to Vancouver Thursday for the League of Poets' Fest & Conference (aka AGM), it's got to be in sooner.

Also...recovering & re-updating files after the crash.

For security, my wonderful computer guy suggested an external hard drive, which goes for an extra $120 or so. This may be a good option, especially for saving programs and settings. (It also assures a little extra money for his pocket.) Burning disks is also a solution, although recordable disks can become unreadable in a scratch. But a 4 gig UHB stick, which goes for like $12, is adequate in most cases including mine for My Documents and photos... but, so easily lost!

Here, though, may be the securest and cheapest solution: on-line storage. You can even store 2 gigs for free. Here's a couple of sites a friend suggested:

idrive.com
mozy.com

If your house burns down, your stuff is "out there". If there's a nuclear holocaust, well, maybe they're stored underground. (I'm sure I'll want to get at my stuff, after I'm vapourized.)

Clearly, with about one in ten hard drives failing every year, this security issue is worth obsessing over until it's dealt with once and for all. Anyone "out there" -- are there known (i.e. hacker) issues with these sites?

UPDATE: Well, I tried downloading mozy free version, but found that I didn't have much flexibility in choosing files to back up: My Documents as a whole is greater than the 2 gig limit, and I couldn't break it down to choose the most useful folders that would fit under that limit. Then I balked about paying say $60 CN a year for the unlimited backup. What am I buying into? What are the security issues about storing files online? Could hackers ever get into my files? (There are issues even with incrypted software). Mozy it turns out is better-rated by a number of review sites than Idrive, but there have been some complaints that, like the old AOL, it's difficult if not impossible to cancel a subscription. Anyway, I need to be convinced, even though it does seem a quick and easy way to obtain off-site data backup.

Searching "Brian Campbell Passenger Flight" on Google, I round this odd little tidbit:

... She waded through chest high water, unaware she sustained a gash to her leg, and herded folks forward to get out on the wing.
Brian Campbell, a passenger in the rear of the plane, said, "Turn around, you’ve got to get out on the wing."
Upfront were Dent and Dail who got folks out on the wing and into rafts.

Seems, unbeknownst to me, that I was on US Air Flight 1549 that crashed into the Hudson.

Apparently my book is available not only at Chapters Indigo and Amazon, but at sites I never heard of: Books XWZ, Keenzo, Hard Cover Deals, AllBookStores.com. Of course, no reviews as yet, but that's hardly to be expected.

POETRY PLEASE (BBC)

A note from a friend a few weeks ago about BBC's Poetry Please, an exceptional online resource. A little context here might serve: I was having trouble downloading podcasts. Excuse the weird lineation that comes of copying and pasting from an e-mail.

Brian,

Some sites will provide their own player so you can hear their
programs online without having anything installed on your end..

One such site which works well, and the work is of caliber is BBC's
program POETRY PLEASE.

It provides it's own player that you can use on-line to hear past
programs from the previous week...so check this out and enjoy.

The readings are fabulous and some of the poems terrific classics too.

Enjoy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/poetryplease_potwpiano.shtml

Try it, try it, try it...it's actually a request line where people
from England request certain poetry to be read. What a simple and
effective idea...a bit better that dial a poem sponsored by the
National broadcaster that is funded by government coffers.

Try this out, it's surprisingly simple and effective radio....some of
the poems are read by the poets themselves like Ted Hughes, Philip
Larkin and that's where the fun is too.

Raphael

PS I just listened to this one and some of the poems are fabulous and
one of the them by a guy born in 1871....who knew he'd web broadcast
on BBC?? So, posterity be damned.

Speak to you tomorrow.

Well, I never took advantage of it ... too busy! (Or distracted.) But another option for a random poetry fix.

Another Delphic passage from Alan Watts' The Book. Again, bear in mind that this was written in 1966.

... To most of us living today, all these fantasies of the future seem most objectionable: the loss of privacy and freedom, the restriction of travel, and the progressive conversion of flesh and blood, wood and stone, fruit and fish, sight and sound, into plastic, synthetic, and electronic reproductions. Increasingly, the artist and musician puts himself out of business through making ever more faithful and inexpensive reproductions of his original works. Is reproduction in this sense to replace biological reproduction, though cellular fission or sexual union? In short, is the next step in evolution to be the transformation of man into nothing more than electronic patterns?

This passage is stimulating in how it seems a melange of on-the-mark as well as off-the-mark speculations. 41 years later, "restriction of travel" seems quite off, in light of how all corners of the globe have become more accessible by jet, etc. -- but if he means a "reduction of movement" or "increasingly sedentary life", as in the post below*, well, we need only to think of computer-bound office workers, bloggers, etc. "Loss of freedom" since the time he wrote is also debatable: in some respects, we (or at least a great many of us) have more choice and influence at our fingertips than ever; in others, we feel ever more powerless to affect things. But what he says about cultural reproduction -- again, bang on, my dear Watts!

*this passage is only two paragraphs after the one below, and in between he talks mainly about the "individual getting smaller and smaller" as population increases and resources shrink.

Alan Watts

Take a look at this prophetic observation by the brilliant Alan Watts. This is from his book titled The Book and was written in 1966. To put it into today's context, we need only think of the internet, broadband, and the corporatization of media:

Despite the fact that more accidents happen in the home than elsewhere, increasing efficiency of communication and of controlling human behavior can, instead of liberating us into the air like birds, fix us to the ground like toadstools. All information will come in by super-realistic television and other electronic devices as yet in the planning stage or barely imagined. In one way this will enable the individual to extend himself anywhere without moving his body—even to distant regions of space. But this will be a new kind of individual—an individual with a colossal external nervous system reaching out and out into infinity. And this electronic nervous system will be so interconnected that all individuals plugged in will tend to share the same thoughts, the same feelings, and the same experiences. There may be specialized types, just as there are specialized cells and organs in our bodies. For the tendency will be for all individuals to coalesce into a single bioelectronic body.

Our Collective Alzheimer's

Print books, if taken care of, can last 3-800 years. Paper, three thousand. Shakespeare's

Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme

was predicated on that.

CD's will soon be as unreadable as LP's are becoming now.

Computer disks get damaged or outmoded; who can read a low-density floppy?

Microfiche fade and can't be replaced (nobody's making them anymore, nor the machines to read them -- from what I hear decades of major newspapers are being lost...)

History is being effaced in an amnesia of succeeding technologies, a kind of collective Alzheimer's induced by scientific advancement.

So when will this blog go *poof*????

I have only the faintest notions about site feeds, but this looks like one. And the first to register on my site meter, which for me has been a major source of entertainment over the last few years.

Digital Maoism

The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

-- Jaron Lanier, "Digital Maoism"

Blog bog...

Old template problems in Explorer seem to have cropped up again. The sidebar (with profile, etc.) has been pushed down below the posts. I've rectified any posts that could have caused problems. The last solution, pasting a certain line into the template as kindly suggested by you AD here doesn't seem to be required. Do you see what I see in Explorer? i.e. that my blog is a mess?

UPDATE: I seem to have solved the display problem in Explorer at least for the front page of this blog by reducing the number of posts displayed here from 23 to 10. This will doubtlessly reduce load times as well, and make "culprit posts" that cause the display to go askew easier to isolate. I guess I'm attached to my posts -- at least the better ones -- and set the number high about a year back so as not to consign them too soon to the nether world of the back pages. On some previous months there are display problems, but at least the front page displays well...

SOME TECHNICAL NOTES, OF INTEREST TO FELLOW & POTENTIAL SUFFERERS:

Have been having all kinds of problems with Blogger of late. For the past three days, I have been unable to access this blog through Firefox; through Explorer, I could see the blog, but up to now, couldn't enter past the dashboard to post. This also for three days. Finally the problem seems to have been rectified, after several complaints to Blogger Support and the help group answered only by autoresponds. (Dozens if not hundreds of people, apparently, have had this problem...)

Right now though, I’m cutting/pasting all my writings here to Word as a backup. I discovered I can cut and paste the text, pictures, links, everything right from the display with a simple press of Select All and Copy. Saving a month takes about 30 seconds. Apparently there's a more sophisticated program available to do that more accurately, and perhaps I'll download and learn it eventually. All this as a potential stress saver. I wasn't exactly worried out of my mind -- Google for goodness' sake I was sure would come up with something, eventually -- but still, I was beginning to feel uneasy. Hundreds of hours have been invested in this blog, and I would hate to see it all go up in smoke.

My impression is that Blogger is understaffed, and that Google (despite it's oodles of $$$) is not giving its all to be a truly responsive or solicitous service. I've never gotten more than autoresponds to questions or reports of problems, never an answer more specific than general advice on their Help page provides. Eventually Blogger may screw up big time, as they almost did with me, and scandalized users will jump to Typepad or some other alternative service, and let the word spread loud and wide.

It seems a law of commercial (viz. human) nature that top dogs get complacent and fall asleep, then tumble to the bottom because they just stop feeling that necessity to be AWARE. Compare to Bill Gates & company winning the browser war, and then letting Explorer go to pot (no updates, security holes breached by hackers) because they haven't felt the need to fight it anymore. Compare to the fall of the Roman empire.

P.S. By the way, as a browser, I highly recommend Firefox, rather than this clunky, unstable thing the majority of you are using... I've said it before, but it bears repeating. Get Firefox. Opera, too, seems to be getting good reviews.

SWINGIN' IT BOTH WAYS

By sheer accident (typing Google's blog into my browser bar rather than Google), I just came across Google's self-justification for submitting to censorship in order to do business in China. Makes for an interesting series of arguments -- circumlocutions? -- in favour of compromising so-called core principles in favour so-called long-term benefits that would serve those so-called core principles supposedly better, and of course bring in lotsa moolah moolah moolah for Google. Better Google than someone with no so-called core principles at all. Right? Aren't we still nice guys? (Better look in the mirror to make sure...)

MY LATEST TOY

Here are some sample photos -- courtesy of Google Images -- from my latest toy, which I downloaded for free and spent about two hours with this weekend: Google Earth. Consisting of satellite photos that have been blended together into a composite 3-d photo of the Earth, you can fly anywhere within seconds -- even tip the world on its axis and glide over its surface as if in an airplane. This program is still in its early generations, but is already amazingly sophisticated. You can type your address into the "Fly To" window, free fall through space and within seconds be hovering over it at about 1,000 feet. Some places -- like the Eiffel Tower above or the Grand Canyon below, are really well photographed, and you can hover over them at 900 feet and see the view below at a pretty nearly perfect resolution. Other places -- in the midst of Africa, Siberia, Antarctica -- get blurry below about 20 or 30,000 feet. (Apparently an enhanced version, for which you pay about $20 a year, is better...) I can imagine in a few years we'll be taking virtual tours through cities, with scenes recorded in real time. Apparently the military doesn't like this, for obvious security reasons. But one thing I like about this program is that it reinforces the notion of the world as one ball in space -- and rather small one, at that. So we'd better take care...

Next time you look up into the sky, smile: a satellite may be taking your photo!

VIRTUAL ANGELS

Buried in all that technical talk in the post below is a quintessential expression of the boundless goodwill to be found on the internet. I had a technical problem; three others wrote extensively on how to solve it, one going so far as to investigate the html solutions for me and coming up with one; the problem seems to have been solved.

Porn, scams and sadism abound, but in this community and others I see a lot of utterly generous sharing and caring, dissemination of good for the mere joy of it.

There are times when this parallel world of "virtual reality" can seem like a society of angels who cannot touch or even see each other but nevertheless help each other in fulfilling their angelic tasks. Somewhere there's a poem in this; there's gotta be.

Sound & Light Show Extraordinaire

For one of the finest flash & sound presentations on the net (or that I've seen, at any rate), check out the web site of Nicolas Ruel, Montreal photographer. If you can't afford a trip around the world right now, here's a pretty evocative substitute...