Strange and Occluded Dreams

Front Wall of the South Australian Museum, North Terrace, Adelaide, July 1988.

If this glass exploded the slivers and shards of Australian pre-history, Aboriginal land rights, the Europeanization of the landscape, global warming (Tim Flannery - The Future Eaters, The Weather Makers - will be  director of this museum 10 years later); the notions of museum (that embodiment of pious theft), university, law, rigidly academic education (examinations held in one of the reflected halls), science as separate from life – the entire British Empire of hierarchies would embed themselves in

whatever they found.

The strange and fearful dreams of childhood, my inability to disentangle this clotted and occluded mass except by leaving, by stepping away, looking back.

(Photos: The Great Family Photo Project)

From The Gutter Press

Lists & what they accomplish

In her essay Toward a More Complete Measure of Excellence, Roxanne Gay remarks:

In Best American Short Stories 2011, six stories were published by a little publication called The New Yorker. Granta, Tin House, and McSweeney’s each had two stories in the anthology. These magazines are undoubtedly publishing excellent writing but their dominance also tells us that beyond the elite tier of magazines, it is more challenging for excellence to be recognized or acknowledged.

The three most interesting parts of BASS 2011 were the foreword by Heidi Pittlor, the introduction by guest editor Geraldine Brooks, and the list of Notable Stories at the back of the collection, a list that does include stories from a broader range of literary magazines while also listing a mind boggling nineteen (by my unofficial count) stories from The New Yorker and several stories for each of a number of other elite magazines like Ploughshares, Tin House, Ecotone, and Granta.

And so Roxanne Gay identifies the literary equivalent of the ruling class. As things stand now, the peasants are unlikely to appear in those pubs, that pub, or any pub those pubs & that pub will deign to acknowledge.

Which wouldn't matter two hoots if there weren't further commissions and royalties at the end of the procedure. Advances and royalties are money, and money is time.

Oh, and respect. Respect for breakfast can set you up for the day.

(At the same time this is not a new situation. The NY Times Book Review was founded to showcase the products of the paper's major advertisers. [See The end of intelligent writing: literary politics in America, by Richard Kostelanetz.] Institutional log-rolling is as old as mass publishing.)

However, in addition to its ability to pickle you in annoyance, this situation cripples the creation of culture. We need to see these books, these stories, these poems; we need them as readers and as writers; we need to interact with the most true and resonant things that are being pointed at and exclaimed at and WTF'd at and wondered at and written about, the inner worlds and the outer –

And we need to be able to do it now.

Not being able to readily read the material that is not included, not alluded to, rendered invisible; not being able to hear about it and thereby find it is killing our ability to make and remake our understanding of ourselves and everything else.

This situation – the ruling class and the invisible ruled – closes down our possibilities at the moment we need them most.

Globally, André Schiffrin has it nailed.

And, as Schiffrin points out, implicitly, the issue isn't power; it's control. Ownership gives control. Over what is said, what is permissible to say – not under my roof – what is effective speech, what not.

Yes, there is the internet. That marvellous device which removes your distribution problem and replaces it with a publicity problem. We can do it without the mass organs of yesteryear – we can network and link and post and comment and create and… But we have to keep at least the net free. We, collectively, have to control something. We have to occupy our voices and our contacts and our contacts' contacts – or our future will not be ours to occupy, at all.

Creation Stories

Just finished watching Revenge of the Nerds (a 1996 PBS / OPB / Channel 4 production about the history of the computer revolution) because we're still waiting for Pirates of Silicon Valley. (I should have Pirates on hold as soon as I thought of it.)

Though this was provoked by Steve Jobs's death, I remember watching it the first time and had much the same reaction - I like hearing this story, not because it's an American success story - in South Australia, when I grew up, ambition was not a virtue and sudden accesses of money were very suspicious - but because it is a creation story.

And, like most creation stories, it's rich in circumstantial detail, but fundamentally mysterious. We still have no idea why we think of things... Kekule's dream, Woz's trip. Creation is not at its heart Apollonian. It's not even necessarily male.

It's doubly strange watching this 1996 production because it ends with Jobs being fired by Sculley (the sugar-water salesman) and fading into mere movie moguldom.

Even when he was young, Jobs's face was opaque in ways that Gates's wasn't. You could see, as he paused while he was speaking, that he ran his perceptions through some sort of mind-body matrix. It is in the body that the connections are made.

He continues to fascinate because he's the only one in the entire computer / wizarding bidness with a second act, with potential that wasn't yet visibly withered and gone.

Details, Moments

During one of our initial discussions about how to structure Golems Waiting Redux, I showed Daniel some details I'd cut from xeroxes of some of the photographs. I had them tucked away in my work-diary as a talisman against work and the way its sameness and its neverending tiny crises can drain the time out of you till you're at the end of another year with nothing done, and exhausted nonetheless – And as a reminder that the project would be done, because Daniel wanted to do it and I would see to it that we didn't let it slip out of sight and out of mind.

Daniel liked the details a lot, suggested we put some of them in the book. "…And so then there are these little moments happening…"

I'd never heard details called moments before. They'd been details since the time of Ruskin, if not Vasari.

It was an odd usage, so I put it away to know about and remember for its oddness, for the way it cut the piece out of the whole, and, somehow, speak as though the whole were momentarily forgotten. The word seemed to me to do this in a way that the word detail could not, because detail always suggests the whole.

Well, the neverending tiny crises continued and I forgot about moments/details, until I read (crisis interruptus) this on Lidia Yuknavitch's blog some months later:

Someday they will write about these things.

Look: this is as far as I've got. Perhaps this is all I have to say.

Theo already enjoying the idea of the cigarette he plans to light upon reaching his production company in fewer than ten minutes.

Look: just here just like this.

We must try to mature more quietly.

The nicotine inhalation. The energizing burn. Pleasure's smoky rush.

Like this and nothing else.

This is part of a page from Lance Olsen’s novel Head in Flames, published by Chiasmus Press. The typefaces represent the 3 different voices in the book – but it's not the fragmentation and interweaving that struck me so much as the insistence on the micro-moment within each fragment. Like this and nothing else.

Lidia goes on to say that Chiasmus books are meant to wake you out of the mental sleep that other books maintain and serve. I take it that she means, largely, corporate publishing.

(There are honourable exceptions here – Le Carré's subject has always been fury at the sheer bastardry of the people he went to school with, the British Ruling Class. The Cold War wasn't the subject, it was the setting of his signature works.)

And so it seems to me that there are 2 sorts of fragmentation going on right now in the semi-unconscious processing in our mental lives: the first, the detail becoming the moment, space-based art becoming time-based art, seems to me to not only invoke flow instead of stasis, but to reject stasis and the whole picture. Even the idea of the whole picture. (Although, if you are teaching and critiquing a piece, or even looking at it, perhaps what you call a detail doesn't matter so much. You're pointing and talking and the whole piece is right there.)

The second acknowledges the whole picture: the ruling philosophy and apparat of our (political, experiential) lives, and rejects it overtly (on political, experiential grounds) to build again from the experienced moment on up.

The universe beginning with a grain of sand.

Digital Rights Management

Until now publishers rewarded writers on a sliding scale: the more copies sold, the more the writer earnt.

Digital Rights Management could be seen as a way to track the published copies for honest royalty purposes. However, because DRM does not prevent piracy it cannot track all the copies of a file. Putting DRM on a book does not ensure proper payment for either the writer or the publisher.

An illustration:

There is no legitimate e-book version of Curse & Berate in 69+ Languages. Those copies are all pirated; the publishers and editors make nothing from them. I don't think there was an e-book clause in the contract; if there was, we removed it, wanting to deal with that separately. Several major illnesses & one merger & acquisition later, we still haven't broached the matter – firstly, the creators and publishers have been pre-empted by the pirates, and secondly, the creators need to get other projects done. GobQ is a very small operation.

For very small-scale operations, piracy really does matter: it does the producers – the writer/editors, the small publishers – out of income that is significant on that economic scale.

As Doctorow says, DRM essentially locks a customer into a particular supply-chain, and this has nothing to do with paying the writer or covering the costs of production and publication. All DRM does is limit the number of copies the less technologically-savvy can access. It creates an artificial scarcity in certain paying segments of the market. DRM exists to make the e-world mimic the hard-copy world and so maintain old (read mega-corporate) commercial structures.

The real question is how to compensate writers and publishers. The answer seems to me to lie in moving away from the per-copy model.

The trouble is we don't know what to replace it with.

Homework: What would happen if Stephen King made no more than, say, Tom Spanbauer? What would that world look like? How would attitudes to writers and writing and publishing change? What would happen to the book trade?

(Due Fri. Sept. 24, at 5 p.m. No extensions.)

Half an Hour Well Spent

I went right through the 800s at my local library the other day. I'd never done that before.

Found a book of Grace Paley's poems (a real poet), a late book of Annie Dillard essays, and Antonia Fraser's memoir about Hard Pinter.

Snagged 'em all. With a graphic novel in drawings and photos about Afghanistan, from 1986, from the graphic novel section.

The bag is full of riches. Life is full of amplitude.

The Virtues of Gender

Sometime last week? this week? somewhere on the web (see goodreads) Stephen King said "Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend."

I was irked by the tone of condescension. I haven't read Twilight; I wouldn't be surprised if it's not very good.* But I can't abide snottiness. It's second on my list of vices, after laziness. And so my first formulated response was, "Harry Potter's not allowed to have a boyfriend."**

But as I was paraphrasing King's comment to my faithful dinner companion that night I had one of those occasional experiences of hearing myself from outside myself, and found my self – or one of my selves – thinking, "God, he sounds like a bloody libertarian."

Which lead me to think about that list of Harry Potter virtues – they are virtues of the lone heroic individual; they are not virtues of interdependence or relationship. (Why is Romance the largest genre by volume of book sales? Why do women keep wanting to re-imagine the world as kind to them?)

And suddenly I saw King's list of virtues as essentially gendered. Which I'd never seen before.

----

*Which goes to show, again, that the words themselves are not what we read for.

**(Dumbledore's gayness was revealed in a post-Potter comment by Rowling. It’s not indicated in the books.)

The Geometry Set

Sometime in the 1930s my father bought this – a draughtsman's set. After my parents were married it lived in the soft darkness – rarely-worn scarves, soft gloves – at the back of one of his wardrobe drawers. I'd occasionally see it when I was desperate and had left my brass compass at school (2/6 at the beginning of each school year because I had a gift for losing them), and had geometry for homework. I seem to remember he lent it to me the day I had to sit for a scholarship exam, when he also lent me his slim, brown, worked leather briefcase with sturdy wrap-around zip. I saw that a little more often than what I thought of as the geometry set, but not much more.

I won the scholarship (much to my shock). Mostly, I think, because he lent me these magical instruments.

The Black Swan

And so we finally saw The Black Swan. I didn't know much about it before watching it, and so I was surprised to see all the ancient tropes: the fragile virginal acolyte, the powerful impresario, the stage mother (only in the chorus, then pregnant), the role too hard to play, the self-slaughter at the moment of triumph...

It was The Turning Point and The Red Shoes, only worse. (There was no supportive company or converted composer, no jealous director / dramaturge. No one at all cheered for the woman in The Black Swan.) There was an amazingly cruel scene where the new principal dancer is introduced to the donors and supporters, pained and complex expressions and champagne on the staircase, while the former principal dancer is in the crowd on the floor below, a nobody, left to scurry off as best she can. (She's later run over by a car, sustains massive damage to her right leg, and cuts herself in the cheeks because she is & has nothing now.)

It was not White Nights. (Oh, that timid, wicked, commissar-loving Helen Mirren, that coward and inferior artist, that failure who failed to grasp the freedom embodied in the West!)*

The Black Swan definitely was not Tap. It wasn't anything with Ginger Rogers; it wasn't Singin' in the Rain or even bloody Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Art is dangerous for women, mostly, it seems, because men control it. Were any of the men in The Black Swan too virginal, too timid, too frigid? (Too unmanly, as you might have thought, but possibly not said, about Robert Helpmann?) Were the men's toenails splitting? Did the director sexually assault them to improve their performances? Were they declared unfuckable? No? And why not?

Arnofsky also directed The Wrestler. It could be argued he's just a misanthropist... But… The Wrestler kept reminding me of Lipstick and Dynamite, a documentary about women wrestlers in the U.S. in the '40s, '50s and early '60s – the punishing schedules, the drugs to keep you going, the cheating managers, the cheating spouses & partners, the virtual impossibility of working your way out of your contract –

Some of management's deceptions in L&D took me straight back to my time in boiler-rooms. So I thought The Wrestler was about class, not gender.

It might be that it's impossible to make a film about ballet that isn't about gender (the limitations of the f, the transcendence of the m.).

Just remind me never to watch another one. Ever.

---
* The character Galina was not an inferior artist: she was a peak performer of classical ballet. Classical ballet was becoming a thing of the past;  the Soviet Union was about to collapse.  Modern ballet, especially America modern ballet, was, in the movie, the dance of relevance, new horizons, the future - all packaged as "artistic growth." What of modern dance 25 years later, when America is on the verge of collapse? Is the Baryshnikov character now quaint and inferior, now that modern dance is becoming a thing of a particular era, emblematic of a future that leaked away into storms and sand? The plot prevented modern dance being presented as another choice, or something a classically-trained ballet dancer could continue to do with an aging body.

You can't separate the economic power of a milieu from the estimation of its arts...

Reading

Nemesis by Chalmers Johnson.

The great relief he gives comes in two flavours: things have indeed changed, changed utterly; he has a name for the disease, and it accounts for all the symptoms we see around us now. The disease is militarism (the worship of war and its weapons and accoutrements, its headlong destruction), and it has always been the deadly enemy of democracy.

And, as occasional relief from the austere comforts of Johnson, I am also reading The Red Queen*, by Phillipa Gregory. She's very good – and the covers of her Tudor novels have delicate lacework of red or silver foil tudor roses in a kind of Moorish arch across the top. They gleam when you tilt the book and the light glances off them. Whatever else falls, light still falls.

---

*Which is something of a tour de force. Gregory takes this vain, ambitious, cold, narrow woman – cabin'd, cribb'd and confin'd by her gender and circumstances, married off at 13 to Owen Tudor, half a country away, whose circumstances do not enlarge or gain in freedom until the Battle of Bosworth – and makes us see her. We pity her at times. Often, in fact. But in her cold, narrow, unlovely way, Margaret repels our pity. She is, finally, the mother of Henry VII and grandmother of Henry VIII - as far and overtly above our pity as she always thought she was.

Gregory is very good. And no slouch at power relations.

The Karate Kid remake

11.13.10

The U.S. is now officially a client state. I saw it for a certainty when I watched The Karate Kid remake. Dre's mother had to go to China for a job.

That feeling of no bottom to my stomach was fear.

We've watched and lived through an epochal shift in geo-political power, and that moves the foundation of even an individual's identity.

You absorb the major power relations of the world as a cognitive and emotional foundation, a major indication of your place in it; and you do that when you're very, very young.

Why We Need Wikileaks - Pt. 2

Because Matt Taibbi has found the real budget, and we need to know about this steady, continual, corrosive looting of public wealth before the fact, not after.

A Weekend on the Couch: Balm for a Bad Back

The Bourne Identity – a man betrayed into redemption by his own unexpected, unsuspected compassion.

Michael Collins – a man who hates war and waste wages the first urban guerilla struggle, expels an occupying power from his country, and creates peace.

Red Cliff – An alliance of defenders defeats an invasion.

Ah... Integrity asserted, defended, discovered, maintained. Yes.

Candles for the darkness

For the darkness, candles.

David M. Koch and The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies (NOVA)

The Monarch butterfly migrates northward from high points on the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico in three stages. Three generations, living about two months each, each migrate northward before dying. The third generation reaches southern Canada. The fourth generation of caterpillars migrate southward through the eastern United States, taking about two months, eventually arriving at the species' winter shelter in the Sierra Madre. The first three generations live about two months each; the fourth lives about nine months.

In that area of the Sierra Madre the indigenous people welcome the butterflies' return each year with a festival incorporated into the Day of the Dead. The butterflies are said to be the returning spirits of their ancestors. This has happened for generations, the people, who are small farmers, the forest, and the butterflies co-existing in a balance. This part of the forest has been made a National Sanctuary.

One of the last points in the documentary is that this forest is now being logged to such an extent that it and the butterflies are now both endangered. The World Wildlife Fund pays locals to be informal wardens and prevent the logging. But the trees are cut down in the middle of the night and, as one of the WWF wardens said, "You don't want to meet these people. They will kill you."

On its face this didn't make sense. There had to be a third factor in this situation that NOVA hadn't mentioned.

Why is there so much more logging now? The WWF warden said that it was people "who couldn't meet their needs" who were doing the logging. So – very poor people.

As a result of NAFTA and its own corruption, the Mexican government stopped giving subsidies to Mexico's small farmers some years ago. As corn prices rose because the U.S. government subsidised ethanol for fuel, poor Mexican farmers were priced out of the corn market. The market in white bread and noodles, the cheaper, less nutritious subsitutes, is largely owned by Archer Daniels Midland.

This is missing third factor.

NOVA went nowhere near it – Archer Daniels Midland is a corporate underwriter of PBS, the entity which buys NOVA nature documentaries.

During the opening credits there are thanks to corporate sponsors of NOVA, among them David M. Koch. Who at the moment is doing his best to destroy both the butterflies and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which airs material from PBS).

On its face this doesn't make sense. There must be some third aspect.

In the film there is one very short sequence where a butterfly is caught in a spider's web. The wings are caught and stuck, splayed and beautiful and helpless. The butterfly is effectively paralyzed. And then the spider comes and wraps the butterfly up in its own organic cling-wrap, and hauls it off (up, out of the frame) to be eaten.

That's what David M. Koch was doing, along with many other corporations / billionaires, sponsoring programming for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Paralyzing it, keeping it unable to utter certain truths before moving to defund it entirely (wrapping it up in a complete lack of budget), and hauling off (up, out of our frame of reference) to be dissolved.

Libya

So the military-petroleum complex is getting itself another satrapy. Rapidly-advancing rebels from the east; Gaddafi losing his grip; the MPC saw its chance.

Libyan oil will go on flowing north and west, into the profit-columns of the war machine.

Shadow of the Silk Road

I've been reading Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron, an astonishing work of travel and history, a gritty, informed description of the present and past of Central Asia.

The section dealing with the surrounding of Afghanistan describe the utter destruction of Islamic culture of those regions. They never recovered from the Mongol invasion. When the Mongols had conquered the city / town / village, they would take all the inhabitants outside the walls, and there they would kill them all, even the dogs and cats.

I tried to imagine that. I can get as far as a fence, the colour and shape of weathered Adelaide palings, and the ground, yellow dirt and a few white stones (the colour and composition of my primary school playground). I can imagine the head of a dead dog, one that has been euthanized. And there my imagination stops.

I can't imagine ruthlessness on that scale. The Mongols eventually abandoned their drive west to deal with the succession after the death of Genghis Khan.

I can't take in the pointlessness. I can't accommodate the idea that military genius is the boundary and canopy of human existence, that everything disappears into it and under it, that Aries is the greatest of the gods and will always defeat Hephaestus, Hestia, Hermes, Demeter.

Animals

I hate the way animals are in our power. They have no defence against our intentions.

The Sum Of My Parts

i – Waiting for the Tram, 1960

Waiting for the tram and the old rust-coloured asphalt cracked, open mouths perpendicular to the track. Waiting for the tram to go to the Bay and out of the corner of your eye a woman with a boy and a girl, dark brown eyes, dark skin. Your mother doesn't say anything, except at other times. You look away. You don't look at your mother. The others are badly dressed, from a Mission. (You've heard, you haven't heard.) The woman is a good woman (better than you) doing good works. (You're selfish.)

You don't look at them again (except they're next to you. Your skin looks at them, your skin shouts them to your mind, their colour.) The dirt mouths are on the ground, jags of dark.

Because of that woman (better than you) (better than your mother) you can go to the beach and your nature (shortcomings, failures) won't be mentioned (during the tramride) this time.

You're lucky. We're all lucky (said at other times). Lucky means your father's job, our house. Lucky means (not a servant) (not raped) (a long way away) (money).

(you've heard, you haven't heard)
(money)
(not a servant) (a long way away)
(next to you) (during the tramride)
(their colour)

(your skin looks)

(shortcomings, failures) (said at other times)

(the colour of their skin)

(money)

ii – My father and –

The Current Affairs Bulletin was partially funded by the CIA. My father used to subscribe to that… I can still see it on his night-table –

My father, the good-natured, the secret sympathizer with women, children, animals, birds, rivers; the hard-working, the honest, the lacker of guile; the man whose father abandoned him; who'd been a clerk and an accountant; who always did his best, who gardened and painted and roofed; who knew the names of birds and their calls, who buried my cat when she died –

Who'd been a drover and seen the hard light of the gibber plain and the dependence of cattle –

He had no idea where the funding for his magazine – the Catholic magazine he relied on for geopolitical information, for the shape of the world he lived in, for the truth, because he believed in truth and thought the thinkers of the Church would give it to him – was coming from.

The Current Affairs Bulletin always on his night-stand. CIA propaganda always on his night-stand.

Such an intimate assault.

Frances Stonor Connor's Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters mentions Australia very briefly.

We are such small beer, to them.

iii – how do i cut

how do i cut
down

open

the skin
the fat the bone the strings
let them out
the lies
the shadows
the lies
the long chains, the strung-together
chains –

how
open
the marrow
the shadow
open
irrigating canals

light on blood like light on water

how do i cut
v-shaped culverts

cut
the hypocrisy, cronyism, the nest-feathering parasitism,
the sanctimonious brazen mealy-mouthed thieving,
the murderous, blame-shifting, self-serving

lies from everywhere

from
my
veins?

iv – Untitled

What do you want to wear?
– Nothing. Nothing.
Where do you want to go?
– Into the rain. Nowhere.

v – Stroking the Cat

Stroking the cat
on the stairs to the garden.
The stairs go to sleep.

Nothing matters:

The dirt is here
the air is here
the leaves are here

The cat is here,
the hand.

The world is air.

The world drifts
the stairs go to sleep.
Nothing matters.

The air
is asleep,
the world
is asleep,

is warm
is fur
is
content.

Why We Need Wikileaks - Pt. 1

Jan 2010: It's almost impossible to know the truth.

One day on the web, one of the Australian sites – I think it was the SMH – had an article about the collapse of the climate talks in Copenhagen late last year. The writer said he'd been in a closed-door session and that the talks collapsed because (impossible to say in the "left-dominated" discourse of mass-media) they were torpedoed by third-world countries – India and China – and not by the wicked imperialists. He went on to say that India and China do not want severe carbon emissions controls because they want a Western standard of living and are using coal-fired power-plants to get it. In this version, India and China calculated that, if the talks collapsed, Obama would be blamed.

Two days later, on the web, I read an article by George Monbiot – the BBC? New Matilda? – saying that he, too, was at the Copenhagen talks and behind closed doors (in a position to know what happened there). Monbiot said the talks collapsed because Obama gave China no option but to walk out. The proposal Obama put, Monbiot said, would have caused China grave loss of face, had been calculated beforehand to cause the walkout, and so to cause the climate talks to fail.

Who am I to believe? How on earth am I to judge between these two diametrically opposed insider reports?

So much of my world is like that. I've lost track of how many times a day I say "I don't know." The public wants to know why "my computer is doing […]." I want to know why management is doing […]. I don't know why General Motors isn't building electric cars, why Obama is raising troop levels in Afghanistan, why Guantánamo and Bagram haven't been closed, why our Central Asia policy and our green energy policy aren't the same policy, why car-repair costs so much, why offices aren't routinely equipped with full-spectrum lighting.

I had some idea of industrial processes from working in a steel-town once and then teaching technical report-writing for several years; I had some idea of farming from working in a dairy-farming district once and having distant relatives who were farmers. But at this point I seem to have very little idea about anything at all – and I'm well-educated, literate, book-reading, and, by most standards, well-informed. I join the dots about current western / global circumstances much better than my colleagues. And yet my ignorance about how the world around me functions is staggering. This is no way to run an adulthood, let alone a democracy.

At the same time I'm aware that steel production has been offshored, that farming is now a corporate mega-enterprise, and so is government. I'm aware that a vast mechanism for obscuring and obliterating the truth now exists: paid proselytizers, presented on the news as independent observers and commentators; corporate mainstream media determination not to report on its own funding of legislation; corporate mainstream media determination to maximize profit / audience by substituting staged and vicious games for investigation of news, politics, education, world affairs, local government, the environment, the climate talks in Copenhagen.

Because corporations now do almost everything that genetic people used to do, the details of almost every process that feeds, transports, houses, and employs us, have become commercial, proprietary information.

I shouldn't be puzzled at my inability to know what's going on. The world, all of it, even the undiscovered creatures at the bottom of the sea, even the things We the People are supposed to own – is now topper than top secret.

It's trade secret.

Dry December

12.9.09. Arctic air, still; the temperatures somewhere between 20 and 30 degrees Fahreneheit. It's cold and whitegold at walking level and blue and calm above.

But yesterday at lunchtime I drove to Fred Meyer because it was windy. I got out of the car and began walking through this unbearably bright silver-white sunlight. I looked down because looking up was painful. Under the SUV I'd parked next to there was an exhaust pipe dripping, and in and around the puddle beneath, three small, black birds chattering and bathing and drinking.

For a minute I wondered if they were bathing and drinking in oil – and then realized the pipe was dripping water. It hadn't heated enough to burn off the overnight condensation.

I looked up. Asphalt, pale concrete, bright hard ground, withered grass; no water between the SUV exhaust-pipe and the river, two miles north.

And then I realized that we, the birds and everyone else, were surrounded by a bright, cold drought.