Wry Argology

Santorum

2011-09-20T18:27:00.002-06:00

Just doing my part to keep Google's search results honest by linking to

http://spreadingsantorum.com/

Thomas Keller's "Buttermilk Fried Chicken" from _Ad Hoc at Home_

2011-06-15T09:05:00.008-06:00

Serves 4-6

NOTE: Begin preparing brine at least 24 hours (ideally 48) ahead.

Two 2.5 to 3 lb chickens*
Chicken Brine, cold (see below)

*This is on the small side, esp. in most grocery stores. I've found that Whole Foods's very smallest birds usually just make the cut. Otherwise yous might need access to a good Farmer's Market. Smaller birds ensure a proper brine and a good meat to crust ratio.

For Dredging and Frying

Peanut or canola oil for deep frying (Gonna need a lot -- I usually buy it by the gallon at the local Asian market and reuse it a few times.)
1 qt. buttermilk
Kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper

Coating

6 c. all-purpose flour
.25 c. garlic powder
.25 c. onion powder
1 T + 1 t paprika
1 T + 1 t cayenne
1 T + 1 t kosher salt
1 T + 1 t black pepper

Ground fleur de sel or fine sea salt
Rosemary and thyme sprigs for garnish

Additional materials

Candy thermometer
Dutch oven or other heavy pot
Big freakin' stock pot for brining

Instructions:

1. Break down each chicken into 10 parts (2 thighs, 2 drumsticks, 2 wings, 2 breasts that are then sliced in half). Add to brine, and leave set for EXACTLY 12 hours. Remove, rinse, & dry. (Chicken can be held at this point, refrigerated, for up to 1 day.)

2. 90 minutes before beginning frying, remove chicken from fridge and allow to come to room temp & sort by cut, putting breast pieces into the bottom of a bowl, followed by (in order) wings, drumsticks, & thighs.

3. Fill pot (I use a heavy, cast iron Dutch oven) with AT LEAST 2" oil, BUT NOT MORE than enough to come 1/3 the way up the pot. Heat to 320º. A good thermometer is absolutely necessary. Set a cooling rack over a baking sheet. Line a second baking sheet with parchment paper.

4. Combine coating ingredients in a large bowl, then divide between 2 bowls. Pour buttermilk into 3rd bowl, seasoning with salt and pepper. Set up a dipping station: 1.) bowl of chicken parts, sorted; 2.) bowl of coating; 3.) bowl of buttermilk; 4.) 2nd bowl of coating; 5.) parchment-lined baking sheet.

5. Just before frying, dredge thighs in 1st coating bowl, dip in buttermilk, drain, dip in 2nd bowl, set on parchment-lined baking sheet.

6. Add thighs to oil, adjusting heat to maintain 320º temperature. Fry 2 minutes, undisturbed. Then move pieces about, flipping to ensure even frying, another 11-12 minutes. Meanwhile, prepare the next cut (in the first case, the drumsticks) to be fried.

7. Transfer cooked thighs to cooling rack, skin side up. Check temp then repeat, first for drumsticks, leaning these on end against the thighs to improve oil drainage.

8. Turn heat up to 340º and coat the breasts and wings. Working in batches, lower these into the oil and fry for 7 minutes. Transfer to rack, skin side up, sprinkle with salt, and allow to rest for 7 minutes. Turn off heat.

9. Arrange chicken on serving platter. Add herb springs to (still hot) oil and allow to fry till crisp, a few seconds. Arrange over chicken. Serve.

Chicken Brine (for 10 lb. of chicken, roughly double what's needed for the chicken recipe)

5 lemons
12 bay leaves
1 bunch (4 oz.) Italian parsley
1 bunch (1 oz.) thyme
1/2 cup clover honey
1 head garlic, halved through equator
1/4 cup black peppercorns
2 cups (10 oz.) Diamond Crystal kosher salt*
2 gallons water

Combine all ingredients in a (very) large pot, cover, bring to a boil. Boil 1 minute, stirring to dissolve salt. Remove from heat and chill completely (at least overnight). Brine can be refrigerated up to 3 days.

*If not using Diamond Crystal, weigh another brand to exactly 10 oz.

Pulpo en Escabeche

2011-06-01T20:13:00.003-06:00

Hi all,

I recently pickled some octopus and there was a call for the recipe, so I thought I'd post my source, from the incomparable Diana Kennedy's militantly authentic The Art of Mexican Cooking (p. 199). The flavor is wonderful, and the presentation is absolutely show-stopping -- tiny purple-pink baby octopi, their little tentacles curled up by the cooking, mottled with black ink spots and set off by green peppers and surrounded by the scents of vinegar and onions and Mexican oregano. I served them as appetizers, straight from the pickle (as Kennedy suggests), but they would look wonderful slightly warmed and served over white rice.

The Recipe:

4 tablespoons fruity olive oil
2 pounds cleaned octopus*

4 garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped
sea salt to taste
1 large white onion, cut into thin rings
1 small green bell paper, seeds and veins removed, diced
1 teaspoon crumbled oregano, Yucatecan if possible [I subbed Pueblan oregano.]
3 California bay leaves, roughly broken up [or add a fourth European bay leaf]
1/4 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper
4 chiles güeros or Fresno or wax chiles, charred [over a gas burner or under a broiler, turning regularly] and kept whole, unpeeled [I used Hungarian.]

1 cup mild vinegar [Pineapple's most traditional. I used white, though I think cider would have improved it.

Heat the olive oil in a heavy pan, add the octopus pieces and garlic, sprinkle with salt, and toss, almost stir frying, for about 5 minutes. [I might have overdone this step slightly, as I was using very small octopi, which I kept whole, on which see note below. A mere minute or two might have been better.] The octopus should be tender but al dente. Transfer half the octopus and juice to a small, deep enamel or stainless-steel pan. Cover with half the onion rings, the green pepper, half the oregano, and the bay leaves. Cover with the rest of the octopus and the remaining ingredients, and continue simmering, covered for about 10 minutes. Taste for salt and set aside for at least 2 hours or overnight.

*A note on cleaning octopus: I'm really not clear on the best way to do this (though I imagine there are YouTube videos to e, but the three main points seem to be: 1) remove the ink sac and organs from the tubular "head" space (this was already done on the octopi I purchased from Pete's Fresh Market on Cermak, just west of Western, 2) dig out the hard beak from it's mouth hole on its bottom, and 3) dig out / slice off the eyes. I tried to keep the little critters as whole as possible for presentation's sake. Kennedy stresses the importance of obtaining octopi that weigh less than a pound a piece -- mine weighed in at only a few ounces a pop.

Boeuf à la Bench

2011-01-03T10:10:00.002-06:00

Beef Braised with Onions, Mushrooms, and Sino-Franco Flavors

yield: Makes 4 servings
active time: 15 min
total time: 2 3/4 hr

Ingredients

• 1 (2-lb) well-marbled boneless beef chuck pot roasts (1 1/2 inches thick)

Rub:
• 1 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1 tsp. cinnamon,
• 2 tsp. ground all spice
• 1/2 tsp. ground cloves
• 1 tsp. grated nutmeg
• 2 tsp. ground coriander
• 1 tsp. ground sichuan peppercorns (toasted, ideally; you may need to grind them in a mortar and pestle, or, failing that, a bowl and a glass)
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp ground black pepper

• 1 lb onions, halved lengthwise, then thinly sliced lengthwise (4 cups)
• 1 lb mushrooms, in 1/8th inch slices
• 6 large garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 2 star anise rounds
• 4 dried facing-sunward chiles (Chiles de arbol might be substituted.)

Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 400°F.
Pat meat dry. Stir together spices for rub in a bowl and rub all over meat.
Spread half of the anise, half of the chiles, half of onions, and half of garlic in a dutch oven and arrange meat on top. Spread remaining anise, chiles, onions, and garlic over meat. Tightly cover dutch oven with foil and roast, turning meat over after 1 hour, until meat is very tender, about 2 1/2 hours total.
Skim fat from pan juices. Slice meat across the grain and serve with onions, mushrooms and pan juices.

Note: Flavor improves with a day or two in the fridge.

[Adapted from Gourmet's November 2005 recipe for Braised Beef and Onions.]

The Imagery Debate, Pt. 2 - Kosslyn v. Pylyshyn

2009-06-02T07:58:00.022-06:00

Following Pylyshyn's paper, many psychologists came to the defense of mental imagery, most notably Stephen M. Kosslyn. Over the following three decades, Kosslyn and Pylyshyn (as well as allies on both sides) would conduct a debate over the relationship between propositional and imagistic content in mental processes. Though both sides presently declare themselves victors (of course), the reality of the matter is somewhat hazier, but also more interesting and more fruitful, than a single set of laurels could indicate.

The debate was conducted on many fronts simultaneously and involved many innovative experiments. To cite just one example, Kosslyn and his collaborator Steven Schwartz responded to Pylyshyn's fears that homuncular sensorium implied a logical paradox by creating a computer simulation that incorporated internal representations of imagery from which propositional content was, in turn, derived. Doing so eliminated Pylyshyn's in-principle objections to the infinitely regressive nature of homunculi. Those interested in more detail and other experimnets are encouraged to consult either Michael Tye's The Imagery Debate or Howard Gardner's The Mind's New Science. Instead, I want to approach the debate with some imagery of my own.

In order to do so, I consulted the bibliography of a major, late-career book on the debate by both Pylyshyn (Seeing and Visualizin: It's Not What You Think, 2001) and Kosslyn (Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate). I then noted every example of either author citing a paper of which he was himself the lead author. Because Pylyshyn is somewhat less prolific than Kosslyn (a function of his running a lab at Harvard), and also because Kosslyn, by mid-career was almost always lead author, whereas Pylyshyn often granted that honor to his frequent co-author and active image debate participant Jerry Fodor, I include Fodor-Pylyshyn collaborations as well. I then dumped the each set of papers into a single .pdf which I in turn fed into IBM's free text visualizing software Many Eyes. I have included links to bibliographies for each author that I compiled in the comments feed.

I first created a wordle, which creates a visual representation of the most common words in a body of texts. Doing so produced the following image for Pylyshyn's work:

Compare that with the wordle of Kosslyn's work:
The first thing one notices is that Kosslyn uses "image," "images," and "imagery" considerably more often than Pylyshyn, but this is perhaps to be expected. Pylyshyn wanting to prove that mental imagery doesn't exist, so one can hardly expect him to use the term as much as Kosslyn, who is defending its existence. The more interesting aberration is the prominent position that "hemisphere" has in Kosslyn's wordle, whereas it does not appear in Pylyshyn's at all. Closer inspection (using Many Eyes' Word Tree Generator) revealed that Kosslyn used the term 521 times, or once every 107 words (an absurdly high rate). By contrast, Pylyshyn uses the word exactly once in the 146,810 words of his articles. "Come, Watson!" I thought. "The game is afoot."

So what's so important about hemispheres for Kosslyn, and why is Pylyshyn ignoring them? It turns out that much of the detail of Kosslyn's work that focuses on how the brain structures the relationship between imagery and propositional content involves identifying processing that occurs primarily in the left hemisphere (where more propositional processing happens) or in the right (where more imagery processing occurs). For Pylyshyn, the distinction is moot because images are ultimately reducible to computation anyway. For him, Kosslyn's distinction merely shows where the epiphenomenon is generated. This distinction arose, I think, because Pylyshyn's belief (following Chomsky and Fodor) that the mind need necessarily be computational, led him to be less interested in empirical evidence about the brain itself.

Interestingly, Kosslyn credits Pylyshyn's critiques with urging him and his collaborators to refine their understanding of how the relationship between these subsystems were structured. Ventriloquizing Pylyshyn, Kosslyn pondered "Does the claim that image representations are depictive imply various paradoxes and incoherencies?" He responds that

Addressing this set of issues was no mean task. My strategy was to take advantage of the abundant evidence that imagery piggybacked upon a a theory of high-level visual perception. This approach allowed my colleagues and I [sic] to develop theories of specific processing subsystems, and helped us to hypothesize where these subsystems are implemented in the brain. (Image and Brain 406)

Kosslyn, it seems, attributes much of his own successto having been prodded by the Pylyshyn the gadfly philosopher (Kosslyn, btw, is currently a dean at Harvard where he also runs an eponymous research lab and holds a chair dedicated to William James; the prodding seems to have worked quite well). More importantly, though, his research platform has proved more influential than Pylyshyn's, though the latter author remains highly respected as well, having recently won France's prestigious Jean Nicod Prize.

Evidence of this may perhaps be seen in each author's continuing relationship with the iamagery debate itself. Kosslyn has, since the early 90s, stopped defending his approach and concentrated on elaborating its details, whereas Pylyshyn continued to make the case well into the 00s. Perhaps the most telling sign of how the debate was conducted comes again from Many Eyes. Returning to the Word Trees, I checked to see in what contexts each author mentioned the other. Here are Kosslyn's references to Pylyshyn:

You'll notice that of Kosslyn's 60 uses of the Pylyshyn's name, he most commonly references his antagonist in a bibliographic setting, as indicated by the commonness of his name being followed by a common and his initials, but that the lower part of the tree is full of words indicating that Kossylyn is rehearsing one of Pylsyhyn's arguments (e.g. "argues that," "wants," "claims that," "suggests"). Now consider Pylyshyn's references to Kosslyn:

Pylyshyn mentions Kosslyn 138 times, almost twice as often as the other way around, but almost exclusively in a bibliographic context. One possible reason for this is that Kosslyn is, indeed, a more prolific author (again, a function of his running a research lab). This does not, however, explain the absence of contextual references. My suggestion is that this absence may be indicative of Pylyshyn's unwillingess to adapt his model to the criticism of his interlocutors. By excluding them from the explicit discussion, he does not need to frame the debate as a debate, but merely as revealed knowledge. He can occupy a set conceptual ground without appearing entrenched.

Intriguingly, Kosslyn, in recent years, has focused on digital visual communication. Though he has not turned to text visualization software like Many Eyes, he has analyzed strategies for presenting information in different graphical formats, most notably PowerPoint. The move toward engineering and toward applied uses for theory developed during the imagery debate also indicates that the underlying field has stabilized sufficiently to serve as a foundation for new structures.

At present, the debate has moved away from treatments of pure imagery and toward inquiries into more holistic models of perception. This is partly a function of improved research methods, such as head-mounted eye-tracking equipment and improved fMRI technology, partly a function of theoretical refinements, such as attempts by connectionist theorists to understand how the brain's massively parallel micro-structure influences its operation or of dynamicists, such as Tim van Gelder, to understand how the fact of mental computations occurring in real-time must constrain theoretical models. At the same time, Artificial Life roboticists such as Rodney Brooks were constructing robots that performed perceptual tasks with insect-level competency and no internal representations and no central processing whatsoever, offering a critique both to Kosslyn's interest in mental imagery and also to Pylyshyn's insistence in a computational model of mind. Meanwhile, an increasing willingness on the part of psychologists to pay attention to first-hand accounts of phenomenological experience has led to groundbreaking research on subjects ranging from synesthesia (as in the work of Richard Cytowic) to accounts of agency (as in the work of Evan Thompson). This drive toward more holistic descriptions of perceptions is seen also in the work of Alva Noë, who argues that perception, and indeed cognition more generally, must be understood as a fully embodied process; an argument extended to include extra-bodily technologies by philosophers like Andy Clark.

Our understanding of how vision functions is by no means finalized, and by reflecting back on the imagery debate, and the the terms by which it was conducted, we may be able to make more fruitful the debates that currently occupy researchers. The rivalry between Pylyshyn and Kosslyn was one of the most productive in the history of cognitive science, leading to voluminous new research and considerably refined theoretical understanding. Part of the reason for this was the very fact of its being framed as a debate, and part was the different disciplinary approaches that each party brought to the table. Though Kosslyn's position may have proved more influential eventually, it likely could not have done so without Pylyshyn's ongoing critique. In the end, it demonstrates a rivalry can, when conducted well, prove as successful as a collaboration.

The Imagery Debate, Pt. 1 - Background

2009-06-01T11:02:00.008-06:00

The history of the theorization of mind can be described as a long list of analogies to different technologies. "Aristotle had a wax tablet theory of memory, . . . Leibniz saw the universe as clockworks, [and] Freud used a hydraulic model of libido flowing through the system [coupled with a] telephone-switchboard model of intelligence" (Rumelhart 205). By the 1950s and 60s, early efforts in the Artificial Intelligence community had borne enough fruit that researchers increasingly began to favor analogies to digital computers for the bases of their models. Doing so produced great strides in the psychological community and jumpstarted what has become known as the "Cognitive Revolution".

One of the most significant developments that early cognitive scientists argued for was the rejection of the conceit held by most working within behavioral psychology (then the most prominent research paradigm operating in the United States) that the mind is a blank slate. In particular, Noam Chomsky's veritable trouncing of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior set the tone for much of the research that was to follow. The existence of his proposed universal "generative grammar," Chomsky argued, required as a corollary a module in the brain that could produce such universal structures. Later researchers -- particularly the philosopher Jerry Fodor -- extended this assertion of modularity to cover the brain as a whole, increasing the analogy to different hardware structures in a computer. In order for their information-processing metaphor to work, researchers claimed, the brain had to run on an underlying mathematical descriptions such as the binary code that forms the basis of computer software. Fodor prominently argued for this position in his influential 1975 monograph, The Language of Thought.

Initially, this research paradigm proved extremely successful, but at the same time, it quickly became clear that certain mental phenomena were difficult to describe in its terms. In particular, the computer researcher and philosopher Zenon W. Pylyshyn argued that recent refinements of cognitive theory required psychologists to dramatically rethink their understanding of mental imagery. In his debate-provoking 1973 article "What the Mind's Eye Tells the Mind's Brain," Pylyshyn claimed that the new research paradigm revealed imagery to be merely epiphenomenal. That is to say, mental imagery has a phenomenological or experienced reality, but it is inessential, a mere side effect of "invisible" subconscious processing to which the mind cannot be made privy. He argued that mental imagery bore roughly the same relationship to the "real" mental process as the images on a computer screen bear to the computations that occur within a computer processor.

He presented two primary arguments for this position. In the first case, he argued, those who believed in the "reality" of mental imagery implicitly reinstated the Cartesian dualism between mind and body. This position was a reaction to then-recent ground-breaking vision research, most notably the incredibly influential 1959 paper (which inspired the title of Pylyshyn's), "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain," in which a team of international researchers led by the MIT psychologist Jerome Lettvin showed that much important vision processing in a frog actually took place along in the frog's eye. Cells on the retina that responded to small, fast moving objects (which Lettvin et al. deemed "bug detectors") triggered the response of attacking the triggering object with the frog's tongue. The fact that the frog's eye and not the frog's brain seemed to do the work of identifying its perceptual object showed that researchers could advance mechanistic descriptions of cognitive systems that could also account for where meaning come from without needing also to posit some sort of non-mechanical "mind" which attributed meaning and made judgments. This research was then replicated (in somewhat less bug-centered terms) in many other animals including humans.

Pylyshyn claimed that those who believed in the reality of mental imagery gave up the ground that Lettvin and his colleagues had gained. He saw mental imagery as a return to dualism, arguing that the mind showed no sign of containing an additional "eye" with which to view the represented image and also reiterating the philosopher's classical critique of dualism: that it implied an infinite regression of nested homunculi. After all, if the brain required an interior structure to view the represented image, then that internal structure presumably required an observing internal structure as well, which in turn required, ad infinitum.

Pylyshyn's other major claim was that the dichotomy then posited by many vision researchers that mental content was either propositional or perceptual was too rigid. Indeed, he claimed, since perceptual content was ultimately reducible to propositional content, the distinction was meaningless. The renowned British opera director, Jonathan Miller, who was originally trained as a neurologist, made a similar (albeit softened) claim some years later:

I recently went to Cambridge to deliver a lecture, and in my apprehension I had rehearsed my arrival in a series of increasingly alarming dreams. About four nights before, I dreamed that I was parking my car in what I knew to be Trinity Lane, although it was from its visible appearance also a narrow side street behind the Santo in Padua. At the end of the lane, I could see the master of Trinity waving hospitably at me, and he was the actor Michael Horden. Now there was no sense in my dream that Horden, the actor, was playing the part, or that he had popped in between the election or anyone else's hopes. As far as I was concerned in the dream, Horden and the master were one and the same, in spite of the fact that I also knew, simultaneously, that the master and Sir Andrew Huxley were identical. The rest of the dream was so humiliating, for which I blame neither Sir Michael nor Sir Andrew, that I shall draw a veil over it. (198)

Miller's point is that his mental image of Michael Horden also contained the propositional content "master," thus blending the two categories. This, it must be stressed, is a softer claim than Pylyshyn's, Miller not being interested in proving the epiphenomenality of images, but it operates along the same vectors.

Pylyshyn's was the first salvo in what would become a proplonged debate over the nature of mental imagery.

[Sources appear in the Comments feed]

The Historiography of Information

2009-04-27T19:21:00.004-06:00

Tracking the historiography of information is complicated by a number of factors. First, the term lacks a single, accepted meaning. Several definitions, some quite technical, have been advanced since the word’s derivation from the verb to inform (originally to enform) during the 14th century, but these meanings have not always proved wholly commensurable (OED). Second, according to many of these definitions, information has existed in one form or another far back in human history, typically well prior to the coinage of the term. In some cases, particularly as it is used in the sciences, the term is essentially a-historical, even taking on metaphysical meaning in the writing of some physicists and computer scientists. A historiography of history should, therefore, include investigations both into information itself, and into changing theories of information, the distinction between which is sometimes hazy. Third, the term has currency in many spheres and disciplines, applying potentially to philosophy, pure mathematics, sciences ranging from physics and to anthropology, media and communications studies, the tech sector, and, of course, common parlance. Its wide-spread application is both what makes the concept so powerful (used as a common referent, it can provide a conceptual, mathematical, and terminological common ground for disciplines that might otherwise be unable to communicate) as well as what makes the concept so frustrating and potentially dangerous (its application across disciplines can serve to erase important differences in how the term functions in various language games, causing stymieing confusion or ill-founded actions).

Prior to the 20th c., the act of informing had always required a receptive audience. Information enformed the form of the receiver’s mind much as an envelope enveloped a missive. But at some point in the mid-20th c., a new sense developed, one that re-defined the term abstractly, as that which is conveyed by a medium, making no reference to a receiving mind. Information was instead a formal or organizational scheme that was instantiated in a particular physical medium. Several historians have pointed to two documents in particular, Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (1948 / 1961) and Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949) as occupying an originating this new understanding of information. The historical number and range of histories that find their beginning here – N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman (1999), an investigation of technological critiques of liberal humanism in contemporary literature; Christian von Baeyer’s Information (2003), a history of the concept of information in the 20th century; and Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006), a tracking of the influence of 60s countercultural figures and thought in the contemporary tech sector, all begin with one or both of the above texts – the diversity of these histories indicates the influence that these two texts had on how people conceived of information. This is, of course, too great a simplification. The OED points out precursors to this abstracted notion of information as far back as 1927, but it seems safe to say that the work of Wiener and of Shannon and Weaver codified and popularized the new notion.

It is important to realize as well that this new notion of information was not simply a process of abstraction (though it was that), but that it also contained more-or-less explicit historiographic element. In particular, Cybernetics argues for information a new heuristic for understanding history. Weiner calls his thesis “neither unfamiliar nor new,” arguing only that his work is the first to codify such assumptions about information mathematically, and even acknowledging that such rigorous codification has its limitations and that there remains “much which we must leave, whether we like it or note, to the un-‘scientific,’ narrative method of the professional historian” (155, 164). Shannon, and particularly Weaver, make it clear that they believe that their abstracted notion of information, one that they explicitly divorce from meaning, could be applicable beyond the realm of telephone network organization for which it was written (99, 114-17).

Indeed, several histories written well before this period seem to foreshadow the informational heuristic. In particular, William Godwin, both in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (particularly the more radical 1793 edition) and in his historical biography, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1804), show an interest in tracking communications networks and how their structuration led to the propagation of certain ideas. Godwin’s line of thinking was likely influenced both by connection with the community of Rational Dissenters, a Christian sect that argued that the Kingdom of Heaven would be realized when, by conversing with fellow believers, humanity gradually improved its understanding of God’s will and through his familiarity with major players in the French Revolution (Philps passim). Such an approach to history also finds roots in 19th century histories of the railroads, such as Michael Angelo Garvey’s The Silent Revolution (1852). Garvey’s book is notable, too, because (like Godwin’s Political Justice) such networks become the means of achieving a utopian future, a theme that will re-occur later in the work of information-inspired futurists.

Information theory’s early technical articulation, as well as its antecedents in railroad history, have perhaps led to the typically materialist bent of most histories of information. Of particular note is the work of one of the most noted 20th century railroad historians, Harold A. Innis, who turned, by the end of his career, away from the study of transportation systems and to that of communications systems. Composed shortly before Wiener and Shannon and Weaver’s texts, Innis’s The Bias of Communication (1951) tracked the way communication networks inform broad historical trends from ancient Egypt up to the present day. His lectures cum essays argued that technologies of information storage have produced, such as the development of writing or the printing press, have led to a dangerous biases in our understanding of the world. In particular, he suggested that the rise of techno-science which such networks enabled led to dehumanization which might best be remedied by a new re-emphasis of oral communication (a belief that bears a curious resemblance to that of Godwin and the Rational Dissenters). Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings, published the same year, dealt with similar themes but treated them explicitly in terms of information theory as he had elaborated it. Equally materialistic, Wiener explicitly analogized communications networks in society to those in industrial machinery much as Innis implicitly analogized communications networks to railroads. Ten years later, Innis’s acolyte, Marshall McLuhan would further popularize materialist heuristics for understanding social phenomena, most notably in his Understanding Media (1964), in which he argued (in a move that mimicked Shannon and Weaver’s divorce of information from content) that it is not the content of a message that matters, but the medium that carries it, a notion he had the savvy to phrase in the advertisement-like slogan, “The Medium is the Message.”

Such interest in communication networks gained increasing specificity and detail in subsequent decades, focusing on specific aspects of different networks. These works deviated from the sometimes radical mediality of McLuhan’s work, but nevertheless maintained a focus on means of communication, even if they occasionally also admitted that the message could itself function as the message. Two example of this are Thomas Streeter’s Selling the Air (1996), which details the rise of “liberal corporatism” led to a broadcast model of radio rather than a peer-to-peer approach as typified ham radio, and Lawrence Lessig’s The History of Ideas (2001), which charts how the interaction between governmental policy and technological approaches to information sharing effect communications networks. Similarly, information theory serves as a heuristic for evolutionary anthropologist Kim Sterelny’s The Third Chimpanzee (forthcoming), which takes advantage of the broad applicability of information theory to create a common discourse between evolutionary biology, archeological, and anthropology in which he argues that the pivotal innovation that led humans to break off from other primates was our ability to use cultural forces to structure learning environments in which high-bandwidth information about tool-use could be passed down through generations.

Such focus on communication media was only the most obvious use of information by historians. As different disciplines began to take advantage of the concept’s robust applicability, and as engineers began using information theory to construct increasingly powerful computers, electronics, and telecommunications devices, the heuristic spread throughout the discourse of the sciences. The most notable example of this is probably James D. Watson and Francis Crick, who, by describing the structure of DNA, showed that the human reproductive system could be described informationally. Similar innovations in physics, most notably the rise of computational physics, which argues that the entire physical universe can be described as a massive computation and of the increasing use of computer modeling in the sciences have led at some physicists and historians of science (notably John Archibald Wheeler, Stephen Wolfram and Hans Christian von Baeyer) to argue that information comprises a sort of universal language in which the entire universe is describable.

Much of the debate surrounding information at present revolves around its use as a predictive heuristic. Since Edward Lorenz’s pioneering use of mathematical models to predict weather in the 60s, the sciences have increasingly come to use computer models to describe nonlinear systems. Such models can be thought of as informational histories of the future, and their demonstrable predictive power is evidence of their productivity. Such innovations have led some information scientists to declare that we are, to cite the title of Stephen Wolfram’s recent book, engaged in A New Kind of Science (2002). The presumed universality of such predictive techniques has proved particularly alluring to futurists, such as Ray Kurzweil, whose The Singularity Is Near (2005) argues that information technology will soon become hyper-intelligent and propel humanity into a paradisiacal world of infinite informational (and sensorial) satisfaction. At the same time, many information theorists argue that such future histories are deeply flawed (the technical term is cockamamie) and that informational heuristics entail non-trivial limitations (see, e.g. Wimsatt, Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings (2007)).

[Works Cited in comments]

Ginger-Grapefruit Vodka Martini

2009-04-13T10:01:00.004-06:00

2 oz Smirnoff vodka
1 oz fresh grapefruit juice
.75 oz ginger suspension
.25 oz honey

Combine grapefruit juice, vodka, and ginger suspension. Add honey and mix until totally dissolved. Stir over ice. Serve up with cherry garnish.

Ginger suspension: Bring 1 c. finely chopped ginger to boil in ample water. Simmer for > 90 min. Strain and reduce to about 4 oz.

[Tried it with gin, btw, and was sadly, sorely disappointed. The juniper ran wild over the other flavors. Particularly tragic because Gin & Ginger is so darned snappy as a drink name.]

A Lyric Form of Wary Positivism

2009-04-12T19:06:00.006-06:00

The Bias of Communication, by Harold A. Innis, the great Canadian economic-historian, tracks material constraints on communication over the course of roughly 7000 years of Western history in just under 200 pages. The terrific temporal coverage of the volume required that Innis move very rapidly through his material leading to a peculiar prose style:

The failure of the Counter-Reformation reflected the influence of force. The growth of industrialism, the interest in science and mathematics, and the rise of cities had their effects in the use of gunpowder and artillery. The application of artillery in destroying the defences of Constantinople in 1453 was spectacular evidence of the decline of cavalry and systems of defence which had characterized feudalism. The instruments of attack became more powerful than those of defence and decentralization began to give way to centralization. The limitations had been evident in the mountainous region of Switzerland and the low country of the Netherlands and in the success of movements toward independence in those regions. The military genius of Cromwell and of Gustavus Adolphus in using new instruments of warfare guarunteed the position of Protestantism in England and Germany. (Innis, The Bias of Communication, Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1951 / reprinted 2006, p. 25.)

Structurally and rhetorically, this is a strange paragraph. It has a topic sentence, and its sentences generally support that topic, but it is basically without transitions. Each sentence just accrues upon the last. Note also that there are very few agents -- living breathing people -- acting within the sentences. Instead, the sentences' subjects are typically abstract qualities or inanimate objects ("the faliure of the Counter-Reformation," "the application of artillery," "the instruments of attack"), and predicates are typically governed by state of being verbs. When humans make an apearance (Cromwell and Adolphus) it is merely to take advantage of the inanimate "new instruments of warfare" which provide the humans' agency. The paragraph ends without a conclusion, without a sense that the evidence pesented led to any specific thing.

I want to liken this to a certain approach to landscape poetry exemplified by John Ashbery's poem "Into the Dusk-Charged Air." A typical passage:

The Rhône slogs along through whitish banks
And the Rio Grande spins tales of the past.
The Loir bursts its frozen shackles
But the Moldau's wet mud ensnares it.
The East catches the light.
Near the Escaut the noise of factories echoes
And the sinuous Humboldt gurgles wildly.
The Po too flows, and the many-colored
Thames. Into the Atlantic Ocean
Pours the Garonne. Few ships navigate
On the Housatonic, but quite a few can be seen
On the Elbe. For centuries
The Afton has flowed.
(Ashbery, Rivers and Mountains, New York: Ecco, 1962, p. 18)

Ashbery's poem moves the way Innis's paragraph moves. In both cases, the passages are structured like a landscape in that their internal components do not have a causal relationship with one another but are related primarily through spatial arrangement. Importantly, though, Ashbery's poem is not landscape but riverscape. Its spatiality is combined with a brutal temporal element normally absent from the peaceful genre of landscape (tho not necessarily from the Hudson River school's landscapes, a fact of which Ashbery, also an art critic and resident of upstate NY, would have been keenly aware). The poem shares a forward momentum with Innis's prose, which itself hurtles through history with the unremitting undertow of the St. Lawrence surging toward Niagra.

The reader experiences this as a sort of caught-up-in-ness. We ride the crest of Innis's prose and Ashbery's poetry not quite comprehending but unable to turn back upstream or swim to shore. This a historical anxiety as well, one particularly exemplified by the lack of historical agency typically presumed to accompany the ever-increasing current of techno-sceintific innovation. Which bring me to my last exemplum: Harper's Magazine's "Findings" column, which briefly recapitulates recent scientific studies in a rhetorical fashion which will by now appear quite familiar:

During the past summer, the number of zombie computers worldwide tripled, and the number of attacks by stupid grizzly bears in Anchorage, Alaska, increased sharply. Polar-bear cannibalism continued to rise. The earth's magnetic field may weaken sufficiently by 3500 A.D. [sic] to allow the poles to reverse. Half of all mammals were in decline, and globabl warming was chasing many plant and animal species uphill. A quarter of elephants in south Indian temples were found to suffer from tuberculosis, a moose in Wyoming was found to have contracted chronic wasting disease, yellow stunt rice disease struck the Mekong Delta, and scientists determined that HIV first infected humans as early as 1884. ("Findings," Harper's Magazine 317, no. 1903 (December 2008): 104.)

The column stresses moments of non-agency (zombiedom, massive environmental change, disease outbreaks), but it does so in the context of scientific discovery. It is the constant realization that we humans are hampered in novel, nasty ways. A weird, wary positivism inheres in this format. Just as the sublime terror that suffuses the images of the Hudson River Valley was coupled with an implicit politics of exploration and expansionism. Innis, it should be added, viewed his book as a polemic for education reform: another wary positivism.

From Cyberculture to Counterculture

2009-04-10T20:18:00.003-06:00

I'm reading Fred Turner's engaging, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, which tracks the influence of a certain breed of libertarian-leaning, cybernetics-influenced, Whole Earth Catalog-publishing hippie (personified by Whole Earth and Wired impresario Stewart Brand) on the computer industry. While I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge that the counterculture had a pronounced influence on the tech industry, I wonder what sort of audience would be interested in a book about the influence of starched and stodgy IBM engineers with 2.5 children, a slide rule, and a golden retriever. Probably no one, and because such a history is utterly uncool, even tho it may well have been the "dominant" influence, it remains oddly untold.

Contemporary tech people want the cultural caché derived from an association with the counterculture, especially as they themselves increasingly corporatized post-bubble-burst (the book was published in 2006, btw). As much as communalist-based organization techniques may have influenced some comp companies, just as many drew their structure from conventional business models and succeeded in spite of or even because of those decidedly un-hippie hierarchies. Turner's book -- and even more pointedly, Turner's book's success -- may say more about the desire to read the counterculture back into the history of cyberculture than on the counterculture's actual influence.

Following Flaubert

2009-01-18T12:31:00.002-06:00

Flaubert studies draftsmanship. He sits, alone in his room, undertaking a deliberate rewiring of the convoluted, pre-Hausman street map of neurons which configure his brain. In so doing, he expands alleys into avenues. Line, previously a cramped dark path becomes something his eyes flow over like so many phaetons bustling along the Champs-Élysées. At the same time, he habituates his brain to this behavior. Each line he draws on the clean white parchment scratches a groove like a wheel rut into the neural pathways of his brain.

Even as line is reified, the laundry white uniformity of a blank field begins to wriggle in his mind’s eye like laundry in a warm breeze. Laying down shading, becoming aware of depth and shadow, a uniform field becomes rich with detail, infinitely discriminable. An undifferentiated mass of neurons slowly learns to make distinctions, each neuron weighted differently, each vibrating differently, each firing according to its newly distinguishably different weight. Even if, like the line of laundry, the array of neurons all sit along the same channel, the same sloping clothes line, the same mental pathway, each is newly differentiated as a result of Flaubert, day after day, trying to sketch this bowl of fruit or that accommodating prostitute. Slowly, Flaubert learns to see not a wall, but a thousand and one bricks, not a man in blue, but cerulean silk folded and rilled by the rumpled concavity of the slouching man’s chest.

Balzac did much the same, learning to notice, to see the detail, to account for each buckle on the soldier’s shoe, every pine speckling the distant hillside. Unlike Flaubert, though, Balzac does not seem to be aware that his senses are more acute. He sees the change as existing out there, merely sees an abundance of new stuff, not, as Flaubert does, the same old world, but registered through a new kind of mind.

At the same time, throughout France, a generation of young bourgeoisie undertook similar studies. They collectively rewired their brains to register the formal and the phenomenological, to be less aware of objects as things, to register them as sights, but at the same time to reify those sights into a new class of things. It is precisely this population, the bohemian student body of the La Rive Gauche, that is absent as Frederic plays the flâneur, but it is precisely these same young men, now progressed, like Flaubert himself, to middle age, at whom the book is addressed. The image in Frederic’s eyes was an image in theirs, is being summoned again by Flaubert to live before them once more. The leap across the decades is no less abrupt and no less invisible than the saccadic leap. Flaubert manages to recreate the real by striding over [thirty years] in the leap of an eye, as unconscious of the movement as a flâneur, his eyes on the shop windows and fruit carts about him, steps over a puddle in the street, never noticing the water, but adjusting his gate nonetheless. Flaubert manages to recall to life for the now older bourgeoisie their long ago ramblings down the streets and pathways of their own neuronal circuitry, their navigation of the folded-over forms of Paris, through the medieval alleyways of the history of their own minds.

Variation on a Theme from Eliot (Pri'y Lil' Cliché)

2008-08-16T08:51:00.003-06:00

Time is a kind of music.
So is life. So is death.
I hear a honeyed harmony
In every sour breath.

Definition

2008-02-18T10:08:00.002-06:00

metaphor, n. - a Venn diagram in N-dimensions where N represents the summed entropy of both terms.

Mud

2008-02-02T17:16:00.000-06:00

Weeds lash the twining shallow wash — seems Carmen’s
toy-boy took the plunge. Wonder what he sees
through silver’s mudthick emulsion — seems Hawks
has rung his paper stainer ‘cause Bogey’s bugged :

What’s he doing
down there, sipping
silt through his nose?
The blued bruise is
whose doing : black
jack or car whack?

Was he bumped or did he jump? — seems Chandler’s
stumped, and the wa-wa brigade’s tongues are
wagging, corpse on a rope — seems some joker’s
loosed shredded wheat to the wind, where

it dissolves, exposed
to the wash of light.

Reel IV: Foggy Plodding

2008-02-02T17:15:00.000-06:00

Group improvisation is a further challenge. Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result. This most difficult problem, I think, is beautifully met and solved on this recording.
— Bill Evans

On Certainty

2008-02-02T17:06:00.000-06:00

Given imperfect knowledge, certainty should be viewed as an argument against rather than an argument for. If one admits that there is some force with the potential capacity to act on the system supposedly being described with certainty, then one must admit that one's reasoning is somewhere mistaken or inadequate. This is not true of systems, such as mathematics, in which all relationships are syntactic, specified through given axioms. It is, however, true everywhere else.

But then again, maybe not . . . .

The Restrictions of Language

2007-10-18T13:33:00.000-06:00

French thinks with its vowels;
German, consonants; English,
everywhichway at once. It's
confusing you know. Pflaargh!

Steinian Analogy

2007-10-14T18:58:00.000-06:00

Miss Furr and Miss Skeene
's to Bird as Tender But-
ton' 's to "Monk's Dream."

Dunno 'bout
Lifting Belly. What
rolls with jelly?

Hume Sweet

2007-08-21T20:30:00.000-06:00

Took me
Good while
To see
How funny
It is
Hume was
Fat .

Fog

2007-06-06T04:10:00.001-06:00

descends on LA :
a drunk passing to sleep.

glides between buildings :
Garbo through Ciro’s.

obscures the night :
left cross to the eyes.

Noise of Production

2007-06-05T04:23:00.000-06:00

I.

“Kitten,
You purr right proper,

So lemme hang a proposition
From your ear :

Let’s me and you
Climb upstairs for a tipple.

And after a sip I’ll
Show you where my

Pyjamas
Need mending.”

II.

Iron bars twist like string
Into a headboard; bathwater,

Matte as newsprint,
Screws slowly down the drain.

Grainy newsreel stock,
Soundtrack cracks open

With gunfire. His hand
Grips your thin thigh

Like slow wood
Round a wire tump.

III.

[Slow fade
Like grime spreading grey

Across a window pane.
Music falls.]

IV.

“Baby,
Don’t you know?

You got to wet the string
To thread the needle.”

Eddie Mars in his Office (The Runaround)

2007-05-31T21:02:00.000-06:00

Horses hang on these walls
like spit sits on ice, flat &
shit slick. Five hundred fatter
& can dig a hole in a bottle
big enough to sleep in. the fan’s
buzzin’ my song & whiskey
legs around the glass
like a thoroughbred, kicking up rye

to scratch his itch, his itching
to scratch this itching nose.

ignis sacer seizes skin

grand mal petit morte
jamb de la mouche
burying

like a breeze through a screen.

(can you see the light
seeping through cigarette burns?
can you hear the projectionist
suppress a sneeze?)

Scene : Warner Bros. Production Offices

Jack Warner :
This film’s
got legs, boys.
Let’s light a fire
under her ass and
watch her

run

:

intraoffice fees epistles lost & found.
let her watch her leg her way around.
stalking runs her ass into the .

Studio Systems Theory

2007-05-30T21:08:00.000-06:00

I.

Caffeine’s glittering realities
grind the stuff of cities to rosebush wreckage :
topography of washed wool
& molar-top hillocks,

as all the while skies hold brilliant still
like a sustaining chord : notes & tongues
piled thick as reams of colored silks.

II.

Playbills spring up, weeds
in-fighting for audience :

sunlight & construction fence,
paste & traffic.

Publicists observe, plotting postings
on situ maps. A chicken in every pot,
a niche in every neighborhood.
Each movie stakes a shifting claim, combs the land
for fickle ore. Battles inch by avenue.
The slow ferric ferocity
of Stalingrad.
In movies,
you gotta run twice as fast
just to keep your place.

In the empty theater, a coat slung
saves a seat for no one.

III.

Films flop & posters peal, flowers
dead & drying bifurcate to dying.
The city’s gaslight sighing.

[When a cosmonaut crosses
the event horizon, she receives no sign
of having passed already into death.]

As down the street, sequels obscure their lineage,
dynasties of paper (coral accrual) bloom, lichen-like.

Biomes unfold like pop-up books,
and poster pulp settles rich and black
as coffee grounds : first thrivings
of bio-economics.

until : the desiccation :

hard yellow days

in Hollywood sun .

Eddie Mars at Geiger's Place

2007-05-29T20:36:00.000-06:00

) when you own the joint,
you scrub the floors with a scarf whisk,
a flipped wrist; wave a black
jack to warner away;
you lay an oscolum infame
on a khmer oscar
trepanned
of its negatives;
or call in your boys
for (applications of rouge. fold
your cheeks, Marlowe — you’ve found

your key,

[Chorus:]

(so scratch shame
& save us))
a ram and a swig

(‘cause only Eddie knows where it turns

[da capo]

The Scream that Pierces (Tarnished Coinage)

2007-05-26T07:56:00.000-06:00

Smoked corpse on the carpet,
tang of fag-joint hanged
in the air. Cigarette ash,
crushed egg of ant : concealer

nards the Persian. Faked duck
on the table or goose-skinned
hieroglyph, nipping ether
from a straw, what’d either

them see? And this —— laid out
on the floor, flat as phyllo —
who’d he
take for a roll in the rye? A.G.,
your argent tongue’s argot
couldn’t screen your skin
from some heater’s
ergotic fire : bullet holes
are blemishes
Max Factor can’t hide,

And buddy it looks
like you sipped your last
on that chinese sax
as Carmen sat

publicity still. Get up chinadoll,
those flashbulbs burned holes
like a screendoor [has]

in this sagging hunk of skin,
and baby, you look quite / the red rod
in this lavender light.

The Kiss-Off (Scratch Track Remix)

2007-05-22T20:13:00.000-06:00

Dear Mr. Marlowe,

Attached cheque hundred I will
than for rendered.
are required. a five-($500)
in more compensation services services
longer is for dollars. trust
prove adequate the Your no

Sincerely,

X

Mrs. Vivien Sternwood Rutledge

The Stakeout (Lucky Strikeout)

2007-05-22T03:31:00.000-06:00

Lucky I

7 42pm

arr. A G Geiger res.
|(460 Laverne terr.)
Geig ents house
44 gray plym. arr :
| Cal 88 P 581 |
Reg. to Carm. Strw.
c s enters a.gs

[Lindy’s fly
weighed heavy on
the snaking flows of air.

eight plus nine
is seventeen chimes.

flybuzz fills the car
like the violet sting
of viper smoke.

I know
who you are.]

9 03 p swatted fly

[flyweights popped.
lucky, he was,
till the kid got hopped.

but Baby,
Lindy got bopped,
& Bruno fried,

uncommuted : uncomputed.
Uncle Ruth didn’t see
the assassins arrive

as the swatter fell,
so the hammer
struck the bell.]

950 rain stops

[who can
compute on the fly
the sky’s ten thousand folds?

stop

black hasheesh
smoke strikes
against the,

stop

uncle beastly
dead
come home, Pop

stop

between these broken
leaves,
the mark]

Lucky II

[rolled beneath driver’s seat :
struck from time.]

Lucky III

1133 p light → side window

[ . . . wish I wish
this coffeebuzzing, this

] Expletive deleted. [

for the washing of the raining
for his fondness

for her burma shaving.
this business of sign post buzzards,

this plucking of the past from
out the grillwork of surveillance trucks

thelight!
is the time is the side in the win—]

1206a.m (?) side window lightout

[ waiting,
like ice in a glass,

get crunched or just
melt away . . . ]

Strike three.
Fade out.

The Ballad of the Fettered Fly

2007-05-08T18:13:00.000-06:00

i.

Musca domestica,
leathered in bibleblack,
bound in a corset
of chitin and wax,

Legs buttress your walls
buoying your vaulted shell,
holding gravity at bay

[a hobo holding back
a pack of dogs
with a six
foot fly's leg --
Musca gargantua]

Whalebone
ribs your corset,
the waxing moon,
the full white swell
of your bulging belly.

[I place my face
beside the quickening tide
of your abdomen;

May I play the moon
in this elliptical dance?]

ii.

Lindy ties the fly
with a thread of tale
spun silk to the air
plane's spinning nose, she

feeds the fly a
razor cut line, as
thin as scarred night's
caesarian crescent, he

cries, onward,
across the sea!

iii.

- pop -

iv.

The fly plummets
deeper than sound,

past bluebottles stuffed
with aery mail and trailing tails
that wrap around a listener's ear,
that pour nematocysts
like sky blue sins
down dear old Uncle's ear,
(that leather purse,
always void of change);

plummets deep

past jacksmelt, bonito,
pacific salmon, past pez luna
themselves passing behind
flashing clouds of silversides
that whirl about : a drunkard's
spinning room;

plummets deep

past giant cuttlefish, eyes
round and blank as
dinner plates
spinning on a broom;

plummets deep,
then comes to rest

away from phasic swell of fuselage,
those crescent rows of airplane ribs
that wax and wane in soundless depths --

plumbs the depths and comes to rest
beside a stray rib,
halfburied in mud,
that marks the grave
of her aery heart,

bottle of unbeating blood,
blue with air and aneurism,
bubbles in the line, bubbles
spinning like the moon.

[the fuel cuts,
the camera blinks,
the plane sinks,
subject to gravity's
eternal rain].

v.

The moon, greaseblack with new;
the seafloor's rampant night, until

vi.

Grace intervenes, razors thorax
(chitin, film of wax) from wing

(two thin frames,
sprocket-lined & mullion veined,

that surface to spread, oil slick
across a Pacific rainbow screen)

Toto, I have a feeling that
Antipodes.

Note: This poem properly belongs after "Legwork." --The eds.

Marlowe Watches the Grass Grow

2007-05-08T17:25:00.000-06:00

I felt it under my feet, wrestling
into the tread of my shoes, holding
gravity at bay : a tramp waving
a broken rake at a pack of dogs.

The grass was green, sure,
green from rain sweated
by Mexicans making a memory
of diddly shit a day and eating

nada but tortillas and beans. Yeah,
the invisible hand’s a convenient jerkoff
when tail is scarce, but studios
rule this town like the sun does

the desert. Thicker the grass, kid,
harder it is to see the ground.

Marlowe Grabs a Bite

2007-05-02T17:12:00.000-06:00

Pour on the ketchup, hon,
& maybe you’ll miss the flavor
of the eggs. Course,
if you’re feelin’ braver,
go it straight. Close your eyes &
down the hatch. Can’t be worse
than the coffee. Gonna taste it
bubble up, come back
like black water
seeped from storm sewers
hours after rain’s stopped, flowing
over curbs, no faster
than maple syrup ‘cross
those silver dollars you got.
& lemme say,
with regards to that muffin,
it ain’t worth no
two bits, but don’t carp
when it comes time
to pony up the tip. Whatcha doin’
here anyhow, that tie on
at three in the morning,
hanging heavy round your neck
like this chipped beef’s gonna sit
in your gut?
Gonna feel it weigh you down,
toots, sure as you’ll taste
that guy’s liver
creeping into your toast.

But hey, smile. It ain’t so bad.
You coulda had the hashbrowns .

Leg Work, or Lady Cab Driver

2007-04-30T17:54:00.000-06:00

Follow that car, Angel,
not too close, but hold it
in your eyes loose as
wilted hope, loose as
a rose in your teeth, hold it,
honey, an American
Beauty you uncovered

from under your brown,
down duvet, delivered
beau-to-be unknown,
though yesterday you left
a sack of pulled teeth,
bait, beneath your pillow,
hoping to snare some fine

fairy to settle down with
out San Berdoo ways
where the saguaros case
the night as she ducks her
stars in a half-collapsed
mineshaft, where
succulents grow fat as

water drops dangling
from rust crusted spigots,
waiting to drip with an
aperiodic dynamic better
suited to some pacific
wild child ringed with fire
and running a fever,

whose waving silvered
mane dances, a man
burning in the dry night
whose fancy turns, like
you oughta do, Angel, on
a dime, onto Coldwater
Canyon to cut through

this clattered hill, light
through glass, sweat
through skin, whispers
through a wall, a smoky
insinuation and nothing
more, dropping us behind
our charcoal Chrysler like

the peppered swing of an
artful alto solo, the nose
of each note brushing
against the back of the
beat, which marches on,
moving unmoved, in
Mickey Moused feet past

Camp Pendleton and into
the sea, the bass line lost
to the smog, the audience,
the chatter, the dishware’s
rattle and the high clean
crash of a lowball shatter,
where it’s lost in groans

of a pleased patron in the
men’s room working a
tail job of his own, and
leaving, believe it, a tip
big enough to make some
not just a bus boy’
Monday night.

Marlowe's Mantra

2007-04-30T17:52:00.000-06:00

Matter
Matters.

Information Overload

2007-04-26T18:09:00.000-06:00

It has become so accepted a truism that we live in a world of "information overload" as to be a cliche. Blackberries, email updates, compulsive texting and -- lord help us -- now it seems that every idiot with a laptop's got to have a blog (wink, wink).

Thing is, people have the situation exactly wrong. We actually live in a world of information deprivation. The more time we spend online or reading texts or ignoring the person next to us at the bar so we can read the scroll bar at the bottom of the CNN news ticker, the higher a percentage of our sensory input is devoted to discrete pieces of information: words, letters, numbers; rather than the constant sensory flux of interacting with a dynamic environment. In quantitative terms, a walk through the woods involves magnitudes of order more information in the form of visual, audio, and tactile stimulation absent from anything broadband can provide. Ask any roboticist and she'll tell you that the hurdles presented by developing a machine that can navigate the web are inconsequential compared to those presented by the development of a machine to navigate your living room.

All this isn't to say that our constant complaints are a symptom of some sort of cultural hypochondria. Rather, when we talk of "information overload," we're dealing with a botched pathology. What we do experience these days is discursive information overload. More and more, we get our info not in the form of raw sensory data, but rather in the form of propositional statements -- the world filtered through the symbolic medium of language rather than the world itself.

Now, this may, theoretically, be a temporary phenomenon. We are slowly moving toward a medial environment in which incoming bandwidth will exceed our processing capacity, where, like the Star Trek Holodeck, media will be capable of presenting a sensory environment indistinguishable from reality. Of course, dreams of virtual reality remain just that, dreams, and they show little evidence of approaching realization in the foreseeable future. (Not to mention the difficulties required of developing an adequate interface with such a system as well as the near insurmountable difficulties involved in producing content for an immersive world.)

But fantasies of Holodecks are like plans for building a Utopia, lots of fun and totally worthless. It seems unlikely, once our medial systems do manage to approximate the information bandwidth of lived experience, that most of us will choose to replicate in that future media environment a world as rich in sensory data as the real world. After all, as a culture, we generally choose to eschew the vivid pleasures of nature for the clean lines and discrete interfaces of our homes and laptops. Information is, after all, generally more distracting than functional, and as long as we plan to utilize it as a tool, we will require that it be user friendly, that it, keep us in an environment where we are so distracted by an overload of discrete, discursive information, that we can't stop and smell the analog (or at least digitally simulacral) roses.

Marlowe Catches a Catnap in the Hollywood Public Library

2007-04-25T04:24:00.000-06:00

Face flat on the broad expanse of readingroom tableland,
the slow puddle oozing from unmoved mouth
bears a striking resemblance to a lemon tree, wood grain
reprising the role it made famous,
a performance so overwhelmed by resemblance
that a conveniently passing Bette
rests her Davis eyes on the fortuitous collaboration
of spit and tablewood and is overcome by the sublimity
of chance. “Son, son,” she shakes his shoulder, “Son,
look thee what fortune hath bred in the dam of thy mouth.
Methinks the many-fingered Fates
do make merry with thy lips, that there be auguries
potent as dregs to be read in the image sketched yonder,
that perhaps the heavenly realm hath breached our borders
and rushes to infiltrate thy form to a purpose
bred on high,” she contorts her voice to a stage whisper,
“or else sired low in Old Nick’s dark and hirsute loins.”

Marlowe unpeels himself from sleep and stares up ,
awash in the murk of waking. “Listen lady,
I don’t know if you’re accustomed to rousing
strangers and speaking in tongues, but buzz off.”

“Zounds, but thou bear likeness to another man I know!”
She tugs at Marlowe’s hair testingly. “Alas, thy pelt
is thy own, while Humphrey wears a wig to foliate
the desert of scalp that dominates his caput. My friend,
thou art my Bogie un-Delilah-ed by time’s razing.

Why, it seems that thou hath bent history’s arrow
Back upon itself that I might observe
the true circuity of its coursing. I thank thou, son,
and take my leave to procure a phial
of that elixir known as lemonado, that its paralyzing acid
might burn time’s etching from my face as it has from thine,”

she says, as in the stacks a familiar librarian
runs her finger along the course of her lips,

runs her finger,
stifling an endless romance of cigarettes,
the rigid consonants of a Slavic tongue.

A Bottle of Pretty Good Rye

2007-04-18T20:17:00.000-06:00

I.

In the event of fire, merge
With ammonia. Smoke
The screen like a cheap cigar.
Step through the silver and
Scream fire
In the clouded theatre.

II.

Sip fire
From a dusty drawer : dis-
Tilation of St. Anthony.
Marlowe, might blighted grain
Pack a punch you can’t duck?
The brunette — sweltered in
Hair, dilating your
Pores — what ergotic bobbypin
Has she up her bun?

Bogie Shows His Chops

2007-04-09T20:56:00.000-06:00

act the auntie, boy, tip the brim,
a pair of pedagoggles, natch,
hang my voice from a birdtwitter,
and draw a line from Hollywood
Public Library straight to your
back door : ma’am, happen
to have a Ben Hur 1860? first? no,
third, erratum in the air?
those duplicate sets of steel
engravings, tuppence colored
and a penny plain. Low latin
leaking unchecked verbiage
from backroom doors.
no. i’m sorry. no.
nothing but a
long legged booklegger,
offended by a coupla’ grapefruits,
a front to hide behind.

:

Sez Bogie, regarding him-
self in the bookcase glass.

Marlowe Browses Geiger's Smut Hut

2007-04-05T18:56:00.000-06:00

Lay your knife into those grapefruits, boy.
Peel page from pith from pip —
Ocean bottom book browsing. What
Volumes of vellum and acid tanned / hide
Your love away along a lonesome country road,
Wind interminable in this season of wind?
So Geiger’s nudie pics ain’t what they seem
You say? Randy backalley road atlas
Of road joining and rail coupling and emery-sanded skin
Becomes the billowing curves of dunes
And salt flats shot white as wedding sheets
Where one small spot of blood
Marks America’s native face. Yes,
Geiger trafficked in illicit landscape photography,
Yes, you yell, Yes! Land opened for homestead ’n’ bedding,
Marlowe runs two fingers, splayed legs, across the page,
Divine rods feeling dark rushing flush of fluid
Beneath the page. The kingdom of production lies deep,
Deep within the boiling bowels of the Earth. Past the cast of
Creaking derrick-hairs decorating the globe’s cleft flesh,
And beyond the pubic tangle of power lines and public works
Sewage pipes churns the steaming wreak of shit-reeking
Creation, and you, yes you, Marlowe, protector
Of the holiest of holies, drop to your knees
And lift your lips to kiss the dark goat
At its puckered pump.

Don’t worry, kid, they’ll be very tasteful.
Artistic, even.

L.A. Lawn Care

2007-04-01T17:41:00.000-06:00

Sprinklers spring to life :
Twenty sharps clearing air.

California blossoms black.
The tarry night.

Reel III : Leg Work

2007-04-01T17:37:00.000-06:00

The fundamental principal . . . I am advocating is to respect the nature of the medium into which life is being inoculated, and to find the natural form of life in that medium.
— Tom S. Ray

A Road Map Back

2007-03-29T17:27:00.000-06:00

Up until this point, I have not mentioned the sectional breaks in Wry Argology (oh-so-cleverly designated as "Reels"), but I figured that I might point my doubtless devoted readership back to see how the land laid aroudn the various poems. The first Reel, titled "The Coming Attraction," runs for only two poems, "American Movie Palace" and "Trailer." The second reel, "The Set-Up," runs from "Starring" to the last poem I've posted, "Gen. Sternwood." Each reel begins with an epigraph. They are:

Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too.
-Frank O'Hara

and

Mechanism is not itself power. Mechanism, without power, can do nothing. Let a watch be contrived and constructed ever so ingeniously; . . . it cannot go without a weight or spring . . . . The spring acting at the centre, will produce different motions and different results, according to the variety of the intermediate mechanism . . . but in all cases, it is necessary that the spring act at the centre.
-William Paley

respectively.

Musings on the Avant Garde, Part 1

2007-03-18T18:45:00.000-06:00

Much of what has been termed the avant garde can be better understood as the expansion of the aesthetic governing a given medium to fill a new space created by technological innovation. So, for example, when Impressionist painters began working more quickly and in the open air, they sought to create sketches that captured a given moment rather than working from a quick sketch to create a highly refined finished product. Likewise, swing music -- and the swinging syncopations of jazz in general -- would never have been popularized before sound recording. While musical notation allows for a composer to stipulate a swung beat, precisely how much the beat should be swung could never be practically specified until real time recording occurred. It is maybe not an accident that "groove" specifies both the idiosyncratic rhythm of a piece of music and a specific feature of the material conduit (i.e. the groove on a vinyl record) for that medium.

Gen. Sternwood

2007-03-17T19:54:00.000-06:00

Legs shriveled inward
like a spider’s, balled
about a central flame, I
sit, fortune spawning only
heat, ears hearing warm,
slow speech : dew drops
from orchids’ tongues .

Bird Brains

2007-03-10T18:25:00.000-06:00

Ravens, turns out, are wholly deserving of their millennia-long reputations as tricksters. They are among the most intelligent members of the bird kingdom, capable, even, of rudimentary problem solving.

Owls, by contrast, are brick-dumb. Behind those eyes, one finds little more than a tangled ganglia of nerves sparking like a strand of faulty Christmas lights, capable only of responding as millions of years of evolutionary conditioning dictate.

Why, then, the reputation for wisdom?

Because wisdom ain't wiles. The crow's talent is a result of its remove from its environment. Its problem solving skills and use of simple tools a function of its ability to change the world it inhabits.

Owls' wisdom, arrived at in the old age of their evolution, weds them to their environment. They are stitched into the night seamlessly, sown in place with threads of air. This is why, when an owl unfolds itself from the sky, we feel such shock. It has momentarily divorced itself from the black night, which all but is itself. The seams, as they tear apart, scream like a rabbit split open.

Mrs Vivien Sternwood Rutledge

2007-03-10T18:14:00.000-06:00

So you’re Dad’s beagle,
hired to dig for Rusty
Regan like a dog nosing a
bone. Alright then, come
and sniff my tree. Try
and cross this stream of
whiskey, clinging to that

stinging scent even as
your nose blossoms with
rye. I can smell the sour
must of Dad’s brandy in
your swagger : that dark
moon sweated on your
back, dripped of orchids.

You don’t say much,
dick, but I hear your brow
cry beef. Just like I see
your second hand suit,
seams sadly resown so
your shirt shows, plain as
a lie and not half so clean.

And shamus, if Carmen’s
your case, be careful she
doesn’t catch your tail
and tear its hairs like legs
from a fly. Let me pour
an image in your ear :
maybe you’d

like to uncover a body
that doesn’t leak like my
Packard drips oil, that’s
not a perforation of
earthworms, swathed in
gunny. If it’ll wrench
Rusty from your eyes, I

might look into owning
a leg in you. I’ll bet on
muscle if I think it’ll
break the book, and
spotter, I’d like to let that
rabbit fly and see the sort
of race you run.

Two and a Half Aphorisms on Structuralism

2007-03-03T17:57:00.000-06:00

1) Structuralism's presumed dependence upon the Center (expressed most insistently by structuralism's favorite critic, Derrida) is, in itself, that which its critics accuse it, structuralism, of being, that is, suffused with latent Platonism.

2) Structuralism is the necessary logical consequence of materialism; every other critical approach oozes voodoo from its seams.

2.1) A world without magic is horrifying, uninhabitable. I want to write criticism conjured to life with chicken blood.

Revenge

2007-03-03T15:38:00.000-06:00

My brother posted the following on my Facebook wall:

A Poem:

Wait, you have a "blog" now.
Just crawl in a hole and die
why don't you.
I'm the philistine brother of
Hippy McHipster.

Look, Drew, you're published!

Liberal vs. Conservative

2007-03-01T17:57:00.000-06:00

First of all, I want to preface my next comments by stating that this is not meant to be an exercise in deconstruction, a rhetorical strategy slash philosophy I dislike insofar as (among other things) it precludes adopting a firm political stance.

I contend that liberals and conservatives have mislabled themselves.* First, some presuppositions:

1. Conservatives are more sympathetic than liberals to the needs of business and of capital in general.

2. Liberals are more sympathetic to the needs of the human individual than are conservatives.

3. The needs of capital are more dynamic than the needs of the human individual when addressed (as is necessarly the case) en masse.

Donc,

Conservatives actually attempt to change the world more than do liberals. This is why conservatives are not necessarily fans of conservation.

*For the sake of clarity, I have continued to employ the terms "liberal" and "conservative" as per conventional usage.

With

2007-02-28T19:58:00.000-06:00

Art Huck (Trevor Bardette) :
Ed’s suck
Runs trucks.
Jones rucks.
Phil’s stuck —
No luck.
Art pucks!

Joe Brody (Louis Jean Heydt) :
Another
Contender
For dupe of
The picture,
Dates Agnes,
Plays Eddy,
And bites it
By Carol.

Agnes Lowzier (Sonia Darrin) :
Femme fatales are
Always running
Cross of Phil, and
Savage Agnes
Ain’t no dif’rent.

Capt. Cronjagger (James Flavin) :
He was edited
Out, but restoration
Reinstated him.

(Elisha Cook, Jr.) Harry Jones :
Studio
Paid to Hawks
Fifty grand,
So to buy
Chandler’s first
Marlowe book.
Howard Hawks
Paid to Ray
Only five
Thousand clams,
Pocketing
Forty-five.

(Theodore von Eltz) Arthur Gwynne Geiger :
War has sequestered
Bogie’s new movie,
Timeliness being
Central to standard
Marketing tactics.

(Tommy Rafferty) Carol Lundgren :
Swinging with Art,
Singing, “—— you.”

Mrs. Carmen Sternwood

2007-02-27T21:19:00.000-06:00

Ooo, you I’ve never seen
before who delivered you
to my door wrapped up in
powder blue filling out
that suit so fine? boy
those cuffs are tight as
your tie is loose and

your hands look hard as
your eyes what’s your
name lemme guess
gimme a clue I’ll catch on
quick just one thread’s all
I need I’ll sew it so nice
and send a stitch

through your hem so your
slacks won’t drag oh and
once I grab hold I’ll twist
you roll you run you
round my fingers tug your
tie like a leash I bet you’d
roll over and let me

scratch your itch bet
you’d purr if I scratched
and I’ll scratch till you
sing leave you mangy and
mouseless too helpless to
swat a fly rub right
through that rug you got

till ten years’ sweepings
come gusting out like a
dust storm. fine
complexion like that you
ain’t nuttin’ but a powder
blue soap bubble drifting
through my door. one jab

from my pinkie you go
pop but buddy don’t you
fret your fetters you’re
too cute to shoot just a
passing glance so smile
while I slip my digits in
your back pocket .

Woot!

2007-02-14T19:25:00.000-06:00

I just got cash to go to UCLA and U of Chicago for grad school. Ditto Georgetown last week, though they still haven't decided if I deserve fellowhips.

Here's to Valentines Day.

Oh, and the last posted poem was not part of WA, but rather an impromptu ode to Chicago weather.

Ostrich Feather Dusting

2007-02-13T19:42:00.000-06:00

Snow drops like lead,
Straight as a papercut,
Through ivory light.

Toes drained white
As winter sun clatter
In steeltipped cold.

The wind is very old:
Shivering piano wire,
Twinkling snowshine.

Norris, the Butler

2007-02-12T19:23:00.000-06:00

Oh dear but you do look the part.
I imagine you’ve not
perspicacity enough
to observe the doormat. Very well.
Traipse filth through my hall. If you only knew
whose burial mud gums your shoes,
you’d not need even see
the General,
and I might save the final
Courvoisier Imperial
for Sunday’s leg of lamb.
But you don’t, and you won’t,
and so you shan’t so much as see
Mrs. Rutledge — though Carmen this way comes.

Establishing Shot

2007-02-11T05:44:00.000-06:00

Babysbreath and broken roses.
Fingers snap : flower stems, brown and brittle —
one two three four five.

One hundred black flies, a-buzz in a briefcase.
Violins sharp as arctic breath rise
to drive color from the pepper trees.

Wear your hat cocked, kid.
Sole leather wears thinner
than film.

[Jump cut.]

Starring

2007-02-08T21:28:00.000-06:00

Norris, the Butler (Charles D. Brown) :
Opens the door for
Marlowe, who enters.
Later, he covers
Carmen’s false stepping.

Ms. Carmen Sternwood (Martha Vickers) :
Conquistadora,
She chauffeurs drivers
To Lido, where they
Can peer at waters’
Thin petrol filming.

Mrs. Vivien Sternwood Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) :
She’s the mover unmoved behind The
Big Sleep’s tender romantic ending,
But behind every demiurge a
Third man’s always observed at urging.

Gen. Sternwood (Charles Waldron) :
Withered stock and
Hot perfuming,
General Sternwood’s
Always looming.

Det. Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) :
Remember him from Hammet’s
Whodunit, Maltese Falcon,
Played P.I. Spade? Or Angels
With Dirty Faces, fleeing
The Dead End Kids : fresh extras
Who pinched his favorite trousers?

Eddie Mars (John Ridgely) :
Tough guy Ed
Runs roulette
Moves hot cars,
Beats his wife,
Looks real fine
Sporting twill,
Ditches stiffs
In the swell.

Lash Canino (Bob Steele) :
Just a sucker
Hooked on honeyed
Schadenfreude, plays
Brainy Eddy’s
Strong arm till that
Corporation
Eighty-sixes
Its producer.

Realism

2007-02-07T18:51:00.000-06:00

First off, why are they called "trailers" if they precede both the feature and the movie they advertise? Seriously, I'd like to know. The OED is unhelpful.

Anyhow, sitting in Panera today, reading The Emperor's Children, I found myself thinking about literary realism, which we all know is a total social construction and bears no actual relation to "reality," whatever that might be, and a heinous bourgeois convention to boot, more insidious and proletariat-oppressing than paying $3.66 for a cup of chicken noodle soup and a hunk of bread just because the walls are painted burnt sienna and there's free wi-fi. Blah, blah, blah.

Here's the thing, the above thesis is, in certain respects at least, empirically testable. Take, for example, the way authors set a scene, typically describing the environment and then moving on to different aspects of the persons within the environment, establishing first of all major physical traits of the characters, such as sex, age, ethnicity, rough build and height. Now, these are, I think, the traits that humans tend to be able to identify in others most quickly given extremely limited visual exposure. If one were to sample a large number of character introductions, quantify the priority of different features attributed to the characters, and compare these with the characteristics identified by people in the real world, that would constitute empirical evidence that literary realism was more than conventional.

Trailer

2007-02-07T18:39:00.000-06:00

I.

Sunday’s nickel matinee
slips between the coral creases
of your brain; stealthy as an urchin, steals
in through theatre fire
exits, usurps your pooling desire. You sit,
silent subject to Hollywood Librarians’
supraliminal will;

(Lights dim. The theatre settles,
an old house expanding to fill the dark.

Lips whisper like feathers.
Somewhere, ships sink.)

and Bogart saunters onscreen, looking
something off the beaten stacks,
like The Maltese Falcon,
bronze McGuffin.

Bacall, hair up,
slides on the screen
like the little black camera’s
a little black dress.

(O, you sultry librarians,
how do you do it?)

Bacall, her bun
a knotted clew,
sets index
to rigid spine
to free volume
from shelf.
It falls, easy
as woman
from grace.
She places

The Big Sleep

in Humphrey’s handsome hands.
“Whatta picture that’ll make.”

III.

Marlowe turns
to the chattering torrent of light.
He winks
recognition at his reflection
glazed on the camera’s lens.

Marlowe, staring from screen,
instant after camera’s shining,
sees his own ugly mug
for exactly

[absolute value of
screen less lens over
speed of light in seconds]

seconds.

Following Einstein, light demonstrates gravity :
gentle swerve to sunshine oblivion
that darkest Kilimanjaro day. Does Marlowe, gazing
projectorward, feel light’s gentle tug
straining to peel image — skin
from a peach — from screen,
reuniting him with Bogie?

You! Look up!
Nothing is ever empty. Motes swim
in and out of light, particles
in and out of being — quanta,
matter, anti-matter exist, then reunite
in probability’s annihilation.

IV.

This shared hallucination in grey-scale
runs thirty-two frames per —

V.

Every crunch of popcorn,
Bursting beneath molars
Like blooming fields of rye
Draws the knot of film
Tighter, tighter, tighter
Round the reel that spins
Behind your wilted eyes.

VI.

[montage]

Words

2007-02-06T19:11:00.000-06:00

So I've got a blog now, and as such I figgered I should get some use out of it. As such, I'm posting a poem a day of my work-eternally-in-progress, Wry Argology, which, for those of you who don't know, which is pretty much everyone, is my poetry manuscript revolving around The Big Sleep.

Without further poo-poo:

American Movie Palace

Summer lawns and summer lawns and summer lawns,
and Sunday’s swimming pool extends blue
to every horizon. O! you rotten chops of water!

Pool light settles, fog-like. Metals corrode
to chlorine blue and moviestars bask in daystar light.
Popcorn rattles like keys each adolescent esophagus.

To backrow smoochers, I say, Yes! Yes! snatch pink glimpses
With red-rubbed eyes that flicker like heaven, spoon
As titans heave butter&salted waves across the screen.

Listen kid :
Feet peel and unpeel. Hands clasp and unclasp.
And the floor, the floor is sticky-sweeter than dreams.